Best Story


STORY:

Miles Teller has made a career out of partying. Onscreen, that is. In films like Footloose, Project X and 21 & Over, he played characters who enjoyed drinking and having a good time. This time around, in The Spectacular Now, he sobers up.

Like some of his previous characters, Sutter (Miles Teller) spends much of his time on screen in a state of intoxication. He, along with his girlfriend Cassidy (Brie Larson), is the life of the party and he knows it. That is until she dumps him, leaving him hungover and asleep on the lawn on a naïve classmate named Aimee (Shailene Woodley). Aimee, who wakes Sutter up in more ways than one, isn’t one of the popular students in school, but she dreams big, hoping to work for NASA one day.

As Sutter and Aimee spend more and more time together, what started off as a casual friendship turns into something much larger than they can handle. But for Aimee, she realizes that she may be in love and sees the extreme vulnerability beneath his smiling facade that brings him back to the bottle time and again.

Unlike other coming of age dramas, which often become cliché and predictable, this one is very real. The characters are genuine and pragmatic. Sutter, who could have easily been one-dimensional, becomes a complex, multilayered character. On the surface, he’s a warm-hearted, over-the-top drunk. The kind of guy who’s popular in high school but will probably never end up achieving his potential because his aspirations don’t extend further than locating his next alcohol fix.

The short running span of the film, 95 minutes, is misleading. By the end of the story, I felt like I knew a lot of the players involved here. From Sutter’s deadbeat father Tommy (Kyle Chandler) to his surprisingly self-aware ex-girlfriend Cassidy to Sutter’s paternalistic boss Dan (Bob Odenkirk), each actor has a powerful role to play in this story.

Adapted from the novel by Tim Tharp, screenwriters Michael Weber and Scott Neustadter have written a story that never feels forced or tired. It simply exists. There are some moments where the dramatic story jumps the gun but the frustrations of those few moments are negated as the story walks back to reality.

Towards the end of the story, there’s a powerful moment where Sutter speaks honestly with his supervisor about some of his personal demons. When supervisor Dan notes if he were Sutter’s father, he would be giving the young man a lecture about his careless lifestyle, Sutter says — in the film’s most poignant moment — “Dan if you were my Dad, you wouldn’t have to.”

It’s powerful and true moments like this that make The Spectacular Now worth seeing right away.


REFLECTION:

  1. I really like my lead and my clincher. I am a big fan of Miles Teller so when I was thinking of my lead I was thinking of the movies he had been in before and I realized they were vastly different than The Spectacular Now. I just thought it was very smooth the way I incorporated his past films. As for the clincher, the scene with Sutter and his boss really got to me and I knew when I watched it that that scene embodies all that The Spectacular Now is: meaningful and captivating, yet casual and realistic. To be honest, I was iffy on the word “poignant” but it seems that it worked in my favor.
  2. While I’m very proud of this piece, I feel I could have made the fifth paragraph, the part about the length of the film, stronger. I feel like it doesn’t contribute very much to the article and with the same idea, I could have, for lack of better words, made that paragraph worth more.
  3. If I were to write this review again, I would have tried to read the book before I wrote the article. This way, I could have a whole angle on differences and done the classic “book vs. movie” argument. (I did read the book, after I watched the movie, and as always, the book won.)
  4. The key to writing this piece was definitely understanding the characters as a whole because without this, they would be missing a vital part of what make the movie different than others. Failing to recognize this simply makes this movie about a frat-guy stereotype leading a nice girl on then breaking her heart.