The Spectacular Now (2013)

Film: The Spectacular Now (2013)
Stars: Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley, Brie Larson, Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Director: Rob Simonsen
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Last year's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, my favorite film of 2012, was a masterpiece in part because films about adolescence are as a whole a cliched, tired bunch of movies.  They are not what you think of as great cinema.  They are oft-parodied (The Breakfast Club has been hero-worshipped and ripped off for so long, we've long forgotten that it wasn't that great of a film to begin with).  They have the same stock characters ("beautiful girl that for some reason everyone doesn't recognize is beautiful," "original attractive girlfriend who is super mean, but everyone loves because she's blonde," "jock who originally dates the second girl but eventually dates the first girl").  Like slasher films and Westerns in the 1950's, it's a genre so stock you could walk in at any moment during the movie and catch up with ease.

The Spectacular Now, oddly enough, decides to take a page out of Perks book rather than the cliche book.  They have several of those characters: Shailene Woodley, for some reason, doesn't think she's beautiful (do people in teenage films not have eyes?), Brie Larson is the stock beautiful cheerleader-type, and Miles Teller the character between them.

 (Spoilers ahead) Except, as the film progresses, we learn a lot more about these characters, and the love triangle suddenly doesn't become the point.  Larson's Cassidy, we can tell, is far better off without Teller's Sutter, a boy who has no father and has developed a heavy drinking problem.  Woodley's Aimee, on the other hand, has no father, but is relatively well-adjusted (isn't it interesting how much we've been conditioned to expect cliches that Woodley's odd loner girl is only odd because she draws characters from graphic novels-I always wonder how I would have been treated in a high school movie, and I definitely would have been considered bizarre and in the corner because I had an after-school job and watched classic movies in my parents' library).  When the two meet by happenstance, their romance becomes a lovely and easy thing-first loves are typically complicated, but the beginnings of them are so easy, as if you've found this feeling with this other person before anyone else has, and everything that springs from it is just wonderful.

The movie has balancing problems in the second half of the movie, with the director wanting to sort of disregard Aimee to further explore Sutter.  The problem is that Simonsen hasn't given us enough due in the first half with Sutter's family to get complete payoff here.  Mary Elizabeth Winstead (who is brilliant in her trio of scenes) does a lovely job playing Sutter's older, trophy-wife sister who is trying to shield her brother from their ne'er-do-well father (who is suspiciously like Sutter, despite what everyone points out afterward), but Sutter's father's scenes seem too easy-I bought that Chandler's father was a louse, but not one that completely wanted nothing to do with his son (his eagerness at inviting his son up didn't meld).  Jennifer Jason Leigh, however, as his mother, was just bad.  I honestly couldn't believe that it was Leigh playing the character (she was so poorly lit, I had trouble picking her out in the initial scenes).  Later, though, I realized it while thinking in my head, "why is she having such trouble connecting with the character?"  This entire plot thread was ruined by Leigh's performance for me, a real pickle considering I know she has been and will be much better.

Overall, though, if you only take into account the first half of the movie, before the drunken father/forgiven mother plotline and the go-nowhere car accident, you have a lovely film.  Woodley is an actress that is growing on me slowly (I wasn't a huge fan of hers in The Descendants), as she understands her calm, introverted appeal.  Teller is great, fully connecting with his alcoholism in a way few actors can (he rarely sees the downside, and as he waits until the very end of the film to realize he has a problem, this is consistent character behavior, a wonderful thing in my book).  His character is charming while somehow not realizing he has become a joke to his friends.  Teller turned in a breathtaking performance in Rabbit Hole (I would have given him an Oscar nomination for the work), and with this, I'm really hoping that he spends less time in the 21 & Over's and continues to find Indies that will work his talents.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Did you run hot-and-cold on The Spectacular Now like I did, or were you decidedly one temperature?  What do you think should come next for Woodley, Teller, and Winstead?  And what did you think Jennifer Jason Leigh was up to in this film?