Film Forum

U.S., 2001
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
Based on the graphic novel by Daniel Clowes
Starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi, Illeana Douglas
Approx. 111 min.

“Enid is a recent high school graduate who lives with her father (Bob Balaban) in a small apartment in Los Angeles and spends her days with her best friend, Rebecca (Scarlett Johannson), hanging out in coffee shops and record stores. Their main activity, though, is mocking—with a callow conviction worthy of Holden Caulfield—the phoniness and hypocrisy that surrounds them. Enid’s capacity for scorn is unlimited: her plucked eyebrows might illustrate a dictionary entry for ‘supercilious,’ and her quiet voice shoots darts of sarcasm in every direction... When boys gravitate to the less rigorously misanthropic (and conventionally prettier) Rebecca, Enid scares them away with her glowering superiority. One of the film’s narrative threads charts the growing distance between the two friends, as Rebecca gravitates toward a maturity that Enid regards as a fatal compromise.” – The New York Times

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“An engaging account of the raw pain of adolescence: the fear of being trapped in a grown-up future and choosing the wrong grown-up identity, and of course the pain of love, which we all learn to anaesthetise with jobs and mundane worries.”
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“The film creates specific, original, believable, lovable characters, and meanders with them through their inconsolable days, never losing its sense of humor.”
– Roger Ebert
 

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