Reviewed: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
While trailers have made many a potential viewer to falsely believe that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright’s Michael Cera-fronted third (but first without Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) film would be an overwhelmingly precious, twee pseudo-sequel to Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, it may still be in possession of perhaps the most honest marketing tagline of the year. In the vane of the sense of humor that pervades Bryan Lee O’Malley comic series the film is adapted from, its posters declare it be “an epic of epic epicness”. No description could be more accurate. In a year that has been notable for visually inventive and emotionally substantial films that have made of habit of reinforcing Avatar’s future place in film history as an emperor with no clothes, Scott Pilgrim stands out as a dense, beautifully crafted masterpiece that arrests attention from its opening seconds and never ceases to amaze. Yes, it is even more impressive than Inception.
Scott Pilgrim (Cera) is a twenty-two year-old slacker who lives in Toronto and is perfectly content to play bass in a scuzzy punk band called Sex Bob-Omb and date a Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), a woefully impressionable high school student who dotes on him because she’s too young to know any better. He also lives and shares a bed with Wallace Wells (Kieran Culkin) across the street from his parents’ house. This precious little life is thrown for a wicked loop, however, when he falls head over heels for Ramona Flowers (fanboy favorite Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a rollerblading delivery girl for Amazon, and has to do battle with her seven evil exes in order to win her heart. On paper, it sounds like the film would not even have to try to replace 500 Days of Summer as the holy grail of slumber party movies. Thankfully, the execution has turned it into something much different (as well as a movie that actually has likeable female characters).
Instead of trying to ground the film in reality, Wright and O’Malley go all-out to make sure that Scott Pilgrim stays true to its protagonist’s perspective. Much like Inception, it is told from the point of view of an increasingly unreliable lead and could very well all be a dream. Unlike Inception, however, Wright never makes a distinction between reality and dreams. A significant portion of the audience may be turned off by the lack of explanations for the dizzying spectacle the film constantly provides and wows us with. If they question the movie’s logic, they do not deserve it. This is a film that tackles the extremely universal struggle of coming to terms with a romantic partner’s past loves and is, at its heart, a very insecure young man’s fight with himself to win a sense of true confidence. The action scenes are an organic extension of Scott’s emotions, never once feeling gratuitous. In that sense, Scott Pilgrim is structurally like a musical - the good kind that would have starred Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire – than anything else. He is of a generation that has been connected to the media since birth, so it only makes sense that he thinks of his life and expresses himself in terms of the video games, movies, and comic books he grew up on. The movie is loaded with more popular culture references than one could possibly pick up from one viewing (or ten), but Wright and his perfect cast never let them get in the way of story or character development. It is not easy to make characters feel real in a such an effects-driven film that strives for a style that usually gets in the way of quality, but the stable of young talent never falters.
Nerdy and normal viewers can relate to Scott just as easily, and one group will not necessarily enjoy it more or less than the other. As long as they are willing to divorce themselves from reality, there is nothing to not enjoy. Wright has quite simply made a movie for people that like movies. A
