Damsels in Distress (Sunday, April 15, 2012) (40)

What the hell happened to Whit Stillman? He made three movies in eight years in the '90s and then nothing for the next 14 years. Now he comes out with Damsels in Distress, which has his typically staccato, arch dialogue, but none of the charm of the earlier efforts (if you want to call that charm... or maybe cynicism is a better word).

Set at the posh Northeastern liberal arts college of Seven Oaks (really, Whit? That was the best you could do for a fake college name? Read more Phillip Roth, please...), the film deals with a rather recycled Mean-Girls-meets-Pygmalion story of three girls Violet (Greta Gerwig), Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) who dress and act much better than their classmates, whom they judge relentlessly. At the beginning of the school year, they meet Lily (Analeigh Tipton) a transfer student who they feel needs their direction. Violet is the self-possessed boss and she gives most of the advice, despite almost never being right about anything.

She dates a dumb, beefy frat boy, because she says dating good looking and smart men doesn't work well as such guys are too hard to control. She organizes the schools suicide prevention program where she insists that tap dance is the best way to cure the students' sads. There isn't really much of a story, as the metamorphosis story of Lily never really fully develops and the plot devolves into a series of generic college movie elements (fights with the school paper, girls dropping out, different boys entering and leaving for no reason).

While I admit that Stillman's three earlier films are not perfect and are sometimes a bit annoying, this film seems to be a sarcastic riff on the sardonic tones of those pictures. When a very dumb joke about frat boys not knowing the names of colors (not because they're color blind, but because they're too stupid to know that blue and green are different and what they are called) falls flat once, we get that same bit three more times... as if it would improve on seeing it over and over again (it doesn't).

This is the most desperate and base comedy imaginable. What Stillman used to do well was take a rather remote corner of the world and examine it with a ridiculous bitterness. Here he takes a rather obvious target and makes banal jokes about the topic. It's very not funny. What's worse, the very mannerist, exacting speech patterns of the first three films kills any element of realism here, making it all seem like a weird, silly, Brechtian play. Sarcasm is its own tone -- you don't need to add silliness to it to improve it.

As a Gerwig adorer, I have to say my girlfriend really does struggle with the material here -- though the material is so bad to begin with, it's hard to blame her. I worry she's not best suited for overly conceived and scripted material and does better working with more personal, artistic control over the material, either meaning less style and more naturalness or more improvisational leeway. The fact is that this movie will be forgotten in a few weeks, so Greta doesn't have to worry about it dragging down her career.

Stars: .5 of 4