Are You With Us?: Beautiful Girls
By Shalimar Sahota
December 4, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Starring – Matt Dillon (Tommy Rowland), Noah Emmerich (Michael Morris), Annabeth Gish (Tracy Stover), Lauren Holly (Darian Smalls), Timothy Hutton (Willie Conway), Rosie O'Donnell (Gina Barrisano), Max Perlich (Kev), Martha Plimpton (Jan), Natalie Portman (Marty), Michael Rapaport (Paul Kirkwood), Mira Sorvino (Sharon Cassidy), Uma Thurman (Andera), Anne Bobby (Sarah Morris)
Length – 100 minutes
Cert – 15 / R
Beautiful Girls plays like a guys' instruction manual on relationships, albeit a basic, four-page one.
Pianist Willie (Hutton) returns to his hometown Knight's Ridge for a few days to attend his high school reunion. While there he is of two minds as to whether or not he should settle and marry his girlfriend Tracy (Gish). At the same time he's become fixated on the girl next door to his father's house, the 13-year-old Marty (Portman).
His best friends have it a lot worse, though. Tommy (Dillon) has a girlfriend, Sharon (Sorvino), but he's still seeing his now-married high school sweetheart, Darian (Holly). Their friend Paul (Rapaport) is convinced that his girlfriend of seven years, Jan (Plimpton), is screwing a butcher, and yet he's infatuated with supermodels, even going as far as naming his dog after Elle MacPherson.
Although beginning with the focus on Willie, there isn't any one character that hogs the screen. Also, given the cast list (and the title), one would have expected a bigger hit. I'm not so sure what attracted so many of them to the film. Maybe it was the moments of wit and brutal honesty spoken in the script, or just the possibility of a few days' work (for some of the actors, anyway).
Writer Scott Rosenberg had previously written the brilliant Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead. During the wait to see if his script for Con Air would eventually be filmed, he was confronted with issues that friends from his hometown were going through, which soon became the idea for Beautiful Girls. And before he could work with John Cusack, he had to make do with the next best thing, the strikingly similar Timothy Hutton.
There's the general Rosenberg wit, but few laugh out loud moments. Tommy and Darian's supposedly emotional talk in the library about their current situation is actually quite hilarious. The dialogue is mainly focused on sex, relationships (couples, families, friends) and the occasional bit of work, be it rating women's bodies, faces and personalities, talking about brown-colored rings (oo-er missus), or whether Willie should take a sales job. But why call it Beautiful Girls? It's an odd title choice, since they're not the centre of attention for the audience, but rather a predicament for the guys. "Why do we always manage to fuck up the good ones?" says Tommy.
Almost every character has some personal ongoing issue, and each one is offering their own words of wisdom to each other. Paul goes on about supermodels offering bottled promise (justifying why he has pictures of them up all over his room), while Andera (Uma Thurman) advises Willie that there's likely someone out there jealous of him, because he is Tracy's boyfriend. Then of course there is the now classic scene with Rosie O'Donnell's Gina and her speech to Tommy and Willie. How they ended up talking to her in the first place is anyone's guess, but the scene is legendary because (almost) everything she says is true - "You wanna know what your problem is? MTV, Playboy, and Madison fucking Avenue."
Natalie Portman in particular achieved universal praise as the overly mature Marty (she was 14 during filming). Focusing solely on Tommy and his possible relationship with Marty might have made for a more a thought-provoking film. Instead, it's an ensemble piece on the complexities of the varying relationships on show. Marty asks that Tommy wait five years for her, and maybe Rosenberg should have scripted a five years later story. Who wouldn't want to see that?
Beautiful Girls opened back in February 1996, probably hoping to be the movie to see over the Valentine's Day period. It doesn't really fall into the romance genre, but most likely mislead a few audiences into thinking that it did. A take of $2.7 million on its opening weekend placed it at #7 at the box office. It was out of the top ten the following week, culminating with a take of just $10.5 million. It has since become one of those classics that many have caught on TV.
Although it may be packaged as one of those vomit-inducingly, sweet chick-flicks, Beautiful Girls twists the genre conventions by telling its story from the male perspective. It's the everyday life and thoughts of men captured on celluloid, and back then there weren't many of those. In fact, does that make this a rooster flick?