Metropolitan (Whit Stillman, 1990)
Cast: Carolyn Farina, Edward Clements, Chris Eigeman, Taylor Nichols, Alison Parisi, Dylan Hundley, Bryan Leder, Isabel Gillies, Will Kempe, Ellia Thompson. Screenplay: Whit Stillman. Cinematography: John Thomas. Film editing: Christopher Tellefsen. Costume design: Mary Jane Fort. Music: Tom Judson, Mark Suozzo.
Twenty-six years after Metropolitan, his debut film, Whit Stillman made one of the best Jane Austen movies ever, his adaptation of her unpublished epistolary novel Lady Susan, which he retitled (borrowing and slightly altering the title of another unpublished Austin novel) Love & Friendship. It's a witty look at the manners and mores of an insular privileged class, which almost exactly describes Metropolitan as well. Instead of Regency gentry, the privileged class in Stillman's first film consists of young Manhattan preppies, all of them well-educated, many of them wealthy, as they make the rounds of parties during debutante season. It's not surprising, too, that Jane Austen makes her own presence known in this scene, through conversations between Tom Townsend and the young woman he finds himself escorting through these parties, Audrey Rouget. She's a lover of Austen's novels who is shocked to find, first, that Tom thinks Mansfield Park is Austen's worst book and, second, that he's never read it or any other novel by her, but is just echoing the criticism by Lionel Trilling: "I don't read novels," he says. "I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelist's ideas as well as the critic's thinking." Metropolitan floats along through the debutante season as Tom, Audrey, and their friends skim the surface of ideas about class and society and sex in their blithe, unformed way. Nothing really happens in the movie, though Audrey develops a crush on Tom to which he remains mostly oblivious until he finally sets out to "rescue" her from the clutches of the film's villain, Rick Von Slonecker, whom the cynical Nick Smith describes as "tall, rich, good looking, stupid, dishonest, conceited, a bully, drunk, and thief, an egomaniac, and probably psychotic. In short, highly attractive to women." Metropolitan has some rough edges -- its young, inexperienced cast, many of them making their film debuts, are sometimes not quite up to making polished delivery of Stillman's lines -- but it's mostly a delight.
