For Sutter (Miles Teller), a charming high-school senior and budding alcoholic, the ‘now’ is all that matters. It is where he can live in the moment and be the life of the party. But after a post-breakup bender, he meets shy Aimee (Shailene Woodley) and the pair forms an unlikely bond, as Sutter pines for his ex and searches for an estranged father.
With strong performances from the young cast, which won a special jury award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, James Ponsoldt's The Spectacular Now dodges cliché to deliver an accessible, powerful and honest coming-of-age story.
Today I went to a screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and saw the book-to-film adaptation of Tim Tharp’s young adult novel ‘The Spectacular Now’.
It was only January this year that I read Tharp’s 2008 book, after hearing that an adaptation was in the works. And I pretty much fell head-over-heels in love with the book, even while having my reservations about its big screen adaptation.
Now I know, I know. Whenever the word “adaptation” is uttered, it’s a bat-signal for fans to come up with their long list of demands and iron-clad rules for the Director/Script Writer to follow. And then the endless whinging or championing of casting announcements . . . I get it. Us bookish-types get tedious when there’s cross-pollination going on. But I was genuinely curious (and maybe a bit hesitant) for Tharp’s book to become a film – mostly because it’s so not your typical YA novel (dare I say, it’s the ‘anti’ YA?) and so much of its charm lies in protagonist Sutter’s internal voice, that reveals him as an anti-hero even while his outward clownish and chillaxed displays herald him as a king amongst his classmates. It’s a complicated text, to say the least.
I actually went into the movie with two small ‘hesitancies’. The main one being that the movie poster (lovely as it is) makes the film look like a romance. And my second concern was for the ending (and hoping it would remain intact). . . Now, having seen the film, I can say one is handled beautifully, but it’s affect on the other is also a weakness in the end.
Within the first few minutes I had a sudden lightning bolt idea – that Miles Teller was like a young John Cusack (even while ‘The Spectacular Now’ is the antithesis to those 80s teen flicks, and Sutter Keely is like a grittier, and far more interesting counterpoint to Lloyd Dobler). There’s just something about Teller – a charismatic, smart-assed panache – that captured Sutter keenly and within seconds. Where it took Tim Tharp a lengthy opening scene showing Sutter’s potential by rescuing a little kid, Miles Teller has audiences in his corner and on his side from the get-go. And that’s very important for Sutter’s character; because viewers are meant to be as dazzled by his chilled, jokester schtick as his friends and classmates, until we start scraping away the facade later on in the film . . .
But if I thought Miles Teller was a dream cast for Tharp’s Sutter, I was bowled over by Shailene Woodley as Aimee – and what those two bring together.
Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley very importantly look like regular teenagers. Woodley spends the film entirely make-up free and in oversized t-shirts, sometimes puffy-eyed and with a mane of hair that she’s always yanking into a messy ponytail.
Miles Teller is engaging and instantly likeable – but he’s no Zac Efron (thank god); rather, he looks like a variation of some kid everyone went to school with or that you see hanging around the train station.
And when these two are together their chemistry comes more from normality than sparking heat – it’s as though director James Ponsoldt just left a camera rolling and happened to capture the awkward bumbling of these two teens. It’s a little bit glorious. There were so many times when I felt Aimee’s vicarious awkwardness, as cool kid Sutter starts paying her attention and she desperately tries to subdue her geek-streak. And, what few sex scenes there are, benefit from being filmed on the knife-edge of awkward – as the camera remains in close-up, even through spontaneous laughter, condom opening and heavy breathing. It’s a blessedly awkward scene, devoid of Hollywood gloss, but that Ponsoldt doesn’t cut away to billowing curtains is brilliant and refreshing.
But Woodley and Teller’s down-to-earth looks and natural repartee also made glaringly obvious what wasn’t gelling so much in the film. Like Sutter’s girlfriend, Cassidy. Fans will probably be upset that Cassidy is played by the slim Brie Larson, when Sutter in Tharp’s book makes a constant (sometimes uncomfortable) point of calling her his “beautiful, fat girlfriend” all the time. Brie Larson is only a couple of years older than Woodley, but she looks too sophisticated beside Sutter and Aimee’s ‘everyteen’ appearance. And where Woodley and Teller play it beautifully natural (indeed, I often wondered how much of their interactions were scripted) Brie Larson was too “on” – she acted too hard opposite two leads who excelled at being deceptively unaffected.
With Miles Teller doing such a good job of being an average joe fuck-up, it wouldn’t have worked for Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber’s screenplay to stay too true to Tim Tharp’s narrative voice for Sutter. Throughout the book Sutter reels off this New Age thinking theory, like about how; “We’re not the Faster-than-the-Speed-of-Light Generation anymore. We’re not even the Next-New-Thing Generation. We’re the Soon-to-Be-Obsolete Kids.” This is reconciled somewhat by Sutter writing his college application and answering a question about overcoming hardship, and which we get to hear in voiceover. But also what we lose from Tharp’s interiority we gain in Teller’s smart-arse remarks and thinking-on-his-feet bullshit.
Now, for what didn’t work for me: the end.
Look, I’ll be the first to admit that the end of Tharp’s book is somewhat ambiguous (I've since discovered, after hearing two friends’ ideas of what happened versus my own) and it’s somewhat bleak. In part, James Ponsoldt’s movie adaptation is about making Tharp’s book more accessible and audience-friendly by injecting some hope and smoothing the rough, dark edges. Where I read the book as being about Sutter hitting rungs on his way to rock-bottom, Ponsoldt’s movie is about giving Sutter ways and means to climb those rungs back out again. So my initial reaction to the film’s ending was a nose-wrinkle . . . but I have since amended my opinion to think; ‘Don’t judge a book by its adaptation’ (that’s not mine, I saw it on a bookshop badge). Tharp and Ponsoldt are discussing a young man’s spiral in very different ways, but that this is a movie about a teenager with a serious drinking problem and convincing happy armour is important in itself. So too is the fact that neither Tharp nor Ponsoldt treat Aimee and Sutter’s story as a romance; for Sutter it’s the kick in the ass he needed, for Aimee it’s something that will hopefully make her stronger.
Immediately after watching ‘The Spectacular Now’ I wasn’t sure how I felt. That I loved Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller was a given, so too director James Ponsoldt’s down-to-earth teen film approach. But the ending felt somewhat cliché (when Tharp’s book is anything but) and it didn’t seem to follow Sutter’s learning curve . . . but then I thought about it some more, and I decided I really wanted to see the film again. It’s definitely one to watch more than once, and a must-see if you haven’t already.
From the BLURB:
Sutter Keely. He’s the guy you want at your party. He’ll get everyone dancing. He’ll get everyone in your parents’ pool. Okay, so he’s not exactly a shining academic star. He has no plans for college and will probably end up folding men’s shirts for a living. But there are plenty of ladies in town, and with the help of Dean Martin and Seagram’s V.O., life’s pretty fabuloso, actually.
Until the morning he wakes up on a random front lawn, and he meets Aimee. Aimee’s clueless. Aimee is a social disaster. Aimee needs help, and it’s up to the Sutterman to show Aimee a splendiferous time and then let her go forth and prosper. But Aimee’s not like other girls, and before long he’s in way over his head. For the first time in his life, he has the power to make a difference in someone else’s life—or ruin it forever.
Everyone knows that if you want a good time, you call Sutter Keely. He’s the guy with a bar in his boot, enough whisky in his flask to go round and he doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘embarrassment’. There’s no doubt that Sutter is the life of any party – but when it comes to relationships, he fizzes pretty quick. He’s accumulated a string of ex-girlfriends in his eighteen years, and remained friends with every single one of them. But right now he’s hoping to hold on to his current girlfriend, the gloriously fat and beautiful Cassidy – of Icelandic eyes and Nordic locks. But Sutter can’t do the one thing that Cassidy asks of him; to consider her feelings. So Cassidy dumps him, and Sutter finds healing in the bottom of a whisky bottle. . .
Aimee Finicky finds Sutter passed out on a strangers’ lawn. Of course she knows who he is, they’ve been going to the same school for years now and she can remember every class they shared and every hilarious thing he did – he’s cool and popular, so it’s no wonder he doesn’t recognise quiet, shy Aimee.
After sharing a paper-route one morning, Sutter decides to ‘save’ Aimee. She has no self-esteem, a gambling mother and Walrus-like stepfather. She wears a purple puffer jacket that makes her look like a Christmas ornament, and her best friend is a miniature tyrant. Sutter decides to take her under his wing, and not a moment too soon.
But it might not be Aimee who’s in desperate need of help. After all, Sutter has never quite recovered from his parent’s divorce and lies to himself about his idyllic absentee father. His sister has been angry with him ever since he set her husband’s suit on fire. And his best friend, Ricky, has gained a girlfriend and some perspective on Sutter’s wild partying ways. Then, of course, there’s Cassidy – who Sutter stills pines for, and intends to win back.
Sutter Keely may be the life of every party, but at some point the lights always come on and the music eventually fades.
‘The Spectacular Now’ is the 2008 young adult novel by Tim Tharp, which was a National Book Award Finalist.
I've been recommended this book for a solid five years now. I bought it and added to the TBR pile, and would occasionally re-read the blurb or scan the first page – but I was never moved to read. And then I heard from Persnickety Snark that a film adaptation was screening to rave reviews at Sundance Film Festival. This intrigued me. And when I found out Shailene Woodley (‘The Descendants’) was in the lead as Aimee, I decided to get on board this bandwagon. And I’m sooooooo glad I did, because ‘The Spectacular Now’ is flippin’ superb, and if it's half as good a movie as it is a book, then it will live up to the spectacular.
There’s a certain plot trope called ‘Beautiful All Along’ – which is as it sounds, that a nerdy-type girl is plucked out of social obscurity by the popular jock who then makes her over, only to discover she was Beautiful All Along. Weeeeeeell . . . Tim Tharp takes that trope, puts it into a blender and hits ‘obliterate’, and what pours out is a disarmingly complex and refreshing young adult novel that’s part comedy with a heavy dose of stalled morality.
Our ‘jock’ in this case is no jock, but rather popular party boy Sutter Keely who doesn’t think he’s an alcoholic, even though he frequently drinks first thing in the morning and by himself. He’s a good, harmless guy but he’s vapid and seriously lacking in self-awareness. Aimee is no nerd, but rather a downtrodden wallflower with the world on her shoulders. And rather than the Beautiful All Along story being told from Aimee’s perspective, we get it from Sutter’s. This is not a romance – and that will frustrate some people. Sutter is not a knight in shining armour – he’s a ticking time bomb who doesn’t know he is his own detonator and Aimee is his doomed damsel.
Tharp has such a great rhythm in this book. Sutter is a genuinely funny guy, he’s charismatic and oozing a certain je ne sais quoi that makes him utterly endearing. But slowly Tharp starts chipping away at Sutter’s armour to reveal the crippling lies he tells himself – and readers start to see what a few of his classmates have already realized; that Sutter believes those lies.
While I was reading this I was thinking that it would be a hard book to adapt, only because the writing is so lush and Sutter’s interior voice so vital to the book. Tharp writes something delicious. It’s little things in the description;
Her voice is so soft. If it were a food item, it’d be a marshmallow.
But Sutter’s worldview monologues are also kinda brilliant, and I'd hate to lose them in the screenplay. So I was really happy to see one movie review in particular that says there are long stretches of banter and blocks of back-and-forth dialogue between characters.
We’re not the Faster-than-the-Speed-of-Light Generation anymore. We’re not even the Next-New-Thing Generation. We’re the Soon-to-Be-Obsolete Kids, and we’ve crowded in here to hide from the future and the past. We know what’s up – the future looms straight ahead like a black wrought-iron gate and the past is charging after us like a badass Doberman, only this one doesn’t have any letup in him.
Now, as to the Sutter and Aimee ‘romance’ – some people will hate it. They’ll just downright hate it. But I revelled in its originality and honesty; I was so glad that Tharp took the road less travelled in teen romances, and the book is the better for it.
“Hey, I told you – I’m not going to ask her out for a date. Let me repeat, she is not a girl I’m interested in having sex with. Not now or any time in the future. I will not have sex with her in a car. I will not have sex with her in a bar. I will not have sex with her in a tree. I will not have sex with her in a lavatory-ee. I will not have sex with her in a chair. I will not have sex with her anywhere.”
“Oh right, I forgot. You’re out to save her soul. Give me a hallelujah for Brother Sutter and his messianic complex.”
“My what?”
“Messianic complex. That means you think you have to go around trying to save everybody.”
“Not everybody. Just this one girl.”
“Hallelujah, brother!”
Look, this book will kick your ass a little bit. There’s this weird thing that happens where, as a reader, you become sort of like Sutter’s girlfriends; all those who fell for his rambunctious charm and carefree loving-life in the beginning, but slowly figured out his failings and shortcomings, becoming frustrated with his wasted potential. The ending is brutal perfection, and if Tharp had concluded any other way, then the entire book would have been a sell-out. As it is, ‘The Spectacular Now’ is one of the cleverest and truest YA books I've ever read.
5/5
