Hildegarde

A couple of nights ago I watched this movie, called How to Lose Friends and Alienate  People.  I’d been dancing around it for a couple of weeks, because I recognized the title, and yet I couldn’t imagine a movie made from the book I’d read.  For one thing, the book was a memoir, and a memoir that involved whole rafts of well knosn people likely to be willing to sue.  For another, the narrative arc itself left something–well.   Let’s just say it lacked a lot of the elements American audiences would be likey to pay to see.

As it turned out, the movie was indeed based on the book, although very useful.

Toby Young’s memoir is about his time working for Vanity Fair, a clueless Brit low-level journalist suddenly catapaulted into US Celebrity Central, which is where he thinks he wants to be.

What follows, in the book, is a dismal record of failure–in an American media culture that expects professionalism, drive, and nearly fanatical devotion to work, never mind absolutely fanatical devotion to watching what you eat and drink, he rampaged through the landscape making one mistake after another until the magazine packed him up and sent him home.

I read this book a couple of years ago, and what struck me most about it was the end, which consisted of a long diatribe about how absolutely awful and unnatural “American” women were.

I put the American in quotation marks there because it’s fairly obvious from the book that  Toby met few if any American women.  What he met instead was a particular kind of New York female whose counterparts in Los Angeles and a few other places represent the only examples of the type on the planet, never mind in the country.  If he’d anted to meet actual American women, he should have gotten out of the claustrophobic clutches of celebrity journalism and met people who, you know, wouldn’t recognize Nick Nolte if they saw him in the street, and wouldn’t care if they did.

The movie dispenses with all the inconvenient facts presented in Young’s memoir–the alcoholic haze, the lack of work eithic–and gives us instead a man named Sydney Young who, if clueless, quite definitely has a heart of gold.

He’s also got a lot of other things Americans want their British-born heroes to have:  a master’s degree in philosophy from a good university; a father who is not only a ditinguished academic but a Lord, which means our hero has a minor title; and a narrative arc that takes him straight to the top of the magazine world before he realizes he can’t stand any of these people and runs off to be with his true love, the Misplaced Magazine  Staffer Who  Is Really A Serious  Novelist.

I”m making this movie sound an awful lot worse than it is.  I actually liked it a lot and watched it twice in two days. 

But likable as the movie is, it is not particularly original and it doesn’t have anything new–or even true–to say.   I sympathize with the underlying premise.  I’ve actually worked with these people, and although I never reached the exalted heights of Vanity Fair, I put in my time on NY glossy magazines. 

But sympathize as I do, Iknow thata most of the people who make serious careers in that world believe heart and soul in what they’re doing, and would not want to be doing anything else.  I’m also fairly convinced that had the real Toby Young made a success of it, he wouldn’t have been claiming to have no use for it now.

What interests me here is why the people who made this movie made this movie.  It’s a nice enough little thing. It has some moderately big names–Kirsten Dunst, Jeff Bridges–plus Simon Pegg, who starred in Hot Fuzz, one of my truly favorite movies.  The photography is good, the sets are shiny, the actors playing the stupid celebrities the magazine chronicles are really, really good at appearing too stupid to breathe in and pump blood at the same time.

But.

The damned thing is a cliche from start to finish, right down to the final apocalyptic smash-up at the Academy Awards.  There’s nothing new in it.

And for all the deficiencies of the original memoir, there was quite a lot that was, if not entirely new, then entirely true, in that.

I’m not one of those people who think that moviemakers must stay “true to the book” whenever they translate it to the screen.  Different artistic forms have different requirements, and there’s good reason why second-rate books make better movies than first-rate ones.

In this case, though, we weren’t dealing with a first rate book, just a book that said some things that the people who made the movie found no reason to pay attention to.  It’s hard to understand why they bothered to pay Toby Young the money to use his title.

Absolutely the best thing about this movie is a fake trailer for a nonexistent movie called Teresa:  The Making of a Saint, in which a gorgeous but mentally brain dead Hot Young  Actress plays the young Mother Teresa as…well, you’d have to see it to believe it.

It runs during the credits, and it, unlike the movie, has a point.