The Mediocre Now

I mean, I dunno if I'd say it's spectacular.

The Spectacular Now. Doesn't it just sound like an indie, coming-of-age movie? That's because it is.

(Someone needs to stop me from watching indie movies. It's becoming a problem.)

The Spectacular Now tells the tale of Sutter Keely, the party hard teenager who essentially doesn't want to grow up because he doesn't see why he should. He drinks and parties and has a hot girlfriend, so like, why would he want to graduate? The beginning of the film sees Sutter lose his girlfriend over trivial reasons, and he writes about it in his personal statement for college, saying it's his big challenge that will prepare him for the future. He gets drunk and he parties and is woken up in the middle of someone's yard by Aimee Finicky, the not-so-typical nerdy nice girl.

What happens next is simple: Sutter's entire philosophy on life is changed as he proceeds to help Aimee out by dating her and taking her to prom and making her fall in love with him.

From the outside, The Spectacular Now seems like just another one of those films, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't consider turning it off after only twenty minutes of watching. But I'm glad I stuck with it, because I was surprised massively by how this movie turned out.

Aimee is the girl who isn't confident in herself and has never had a boyfriend and has dreams bigger than anyone else's in the world; Sutter is the boy who puts whiskey in his soft drinks and flirts with his ex-girlfriend and doesn't know where his dad is. And somehow, over the course of this movie - and although it hardly seems like it while you're actually watching it - the two of them become this entity that I didn't want to see go. Sutter spends the entirety of the movie saying what they have is nothing, saying Aimee won't fall in love with him, saying he's got it under control. 

So it was really no surprise when Aimee does fall in love with him. It's easy to see it coming - Sutter begins teaching her how to love herself from the very beginning, saying she's beautiful and she can't let her mother dictate her life, and as I stumbled down this winding path with them, I saw myself hoping more and more that she would at least confess it. (She did, after they called and visited his dad, who turned out to be a drunk who didn't really care about his only son - and Sutter told her again and again that she didn't love him, she shouldn't love him.) She wants them to move in together after graduation, go to Philly and find dumb jobs, but she ends up leaving without him because, more than anything, Sutter can't grow up. 

It's this underlying current throughout the entire movie, popping up every few scenes during conversations with teachers or his mother or his ex-girlfriend. More than this love story that unfolds before your eyes, you see Sutter fall deeper and deeper into his own trap. He reminds me of Peter Pan - he won't grow up and he refuses to take responsibility for anything and he doesn't want to move on from being a teenager in high school; it's pulling him down because he can't give himself or anyone else a future. He can't even promise not to come into work drunk so he ends up losing his job, and it seems like, after everything that happened between he and Aimee, between he and his dad - it seems like nothing really mattered.

And then the greatest thing happens.

Sutter returns to his personal statement about his greatest challenge, and he erases the answer he had before. Instead, he writes about his greatest challenge - himself. Just - watch it. 

I don't think I've ever been more excited about character development in my life. (And I'm a writer, so... that says something.) Sutter made a huge realization about himself. It took a whole lot of awful things happening for him to make it, but - he made it. Just like the past few movies I've watched, The Spectacular Now wasn't just about the romance - it had some pretty good messages in it too. I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did, but I've never been so glad to be surprised by the ending of a movie.

Because I think a lot of high school students feel the same way as Sutter. A lot of us don't want to grow up for our own reasons, and we think about the future and sometimes we don't see the point. We don't see what's so great about being an adult and paying bills and having to take responsibility for everything we didn't have to as kids. Sutter showed me it's okay not to want the future, but you have to take it anyway. You have to feel things - the good and the bad - in order to get anywhere. You can't take things for granted. Aimee showed me that you have to dream and you have to love and you have to be everything you want to be, because no one is going to hand you anything on a silver platter.

Aimee and Sutter's love story wasn't so much about love as it was about growing up and moving on. And I loved that.

And I love this movie.

I'm rating The Spectacular Now four cookies out of a possible five. And now I don't hate Shailene Woodley as much as I used to.