This melancholy story, based on the novella by Steve Martin, follows the trajectories of three lonely souls as they try to connect.
By:Bob Brown
Steve Martin long ago dispensed with that "wild and crazy guy" who made balloon animals and played the banjo. Like Woody Allen, he’s passed through his comedy phase and is navigating more sober waters. He’s a fine serious actor when called upon (The Spanish Prisoner), a sophisticated playwright (Picasso at the Lapin Agile) and a well-regarded writer of short fiction, as in the novella on which this film, via his screenplay, is based. But the question is, can he think like a girl?
There’s nothing at all wrong with Shopgirl and much that is so right. But it does make one long for the antic Steve Martin wit, which pops its head up now and again in this romantic quasi-comic movie. One can hardly fault the cast, especially Mr. Martin, who ought to know how to play his own creation, Ray Porter. He’s a wealthy, bored, emotionally unavailable executive who likes to have a warm body handy on a regular basis, whether at his home in Seattle or in Los Angeles. No strings are attached, a point he assumes the women he picks will understand. Still, with Mr. Martin as the off-screen narrator who is not Mr. Porter, one imagines it might have been less confusing to have another actor play the role.
Porter is a type who has been appearing with some regularity in recent films. Two other similar characters happen also to be played by a clown with a melancholy edge Bill Murray. In Broken Flowers, Murray is Don Johnston, a wealthy electronics executive. Johnston searches vainly, and with yearning that borders on ennui, for a mystery offspring who resulted from one of Johnston’s many failed relationships. As Bob Harris in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, Murray again plays the jaded, middle-aged man of means, a faded star with a faded marriage whose unexpected cross-generational encounter with Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) produces light but no heat.
Like Harris, Porter has an encounter with a woman young enough to be his daughter. The difference is, Porter is a suave operator who sets it up. Mirabelle (Claire Danes) is a glove-sales clerk at Saks. It is interesting to compare Coppola and Martin’s May-November couples, coming from female and male perspectives, respectively. Whereas Harris and Charlotte meet accidentally and engage in a titillating cat-and-mouse game that has no actual sex, Mirabelle is a much less worldly girl from Vermont who doesn’t know how to play the game. She jumps into bed quite readily and hopes for the best.
It seems she has no radar to tell when a man is worth the whistle. As she says to Jeremy, whom she meets in a laundromat, "I’m a terrible judge of character." The slob Jeremy (broadly and amusingly portrayed by Jason Schwartzman) is so naively sincere, he lacks any smooth moves to impress a girl. "Are you the kind of person that takes time to get to know, and then once you get to know them… they’re fabulous?" she asks him after their first disastrous date. "Yes, definitely," he answers. At least he plans to be.
Ms. Danes is perfect for the role. She’s always specialized in plain, vulnerable young women. She has mastered the quivering lip and the moistened eye. When Mirabelle weeps, it’s from a place so deep inside, what emerges has been welling up like magma. Mr. Martin’s Ray is suave with a surface smoothness that betrays no passion. He easily gives material things, of which he has plenty, but he finds it hard to share what he cannot find in himself. The droning strings of the musical score by Barrington Pheloung (who also scored the director Anand Tucker’s Hilary and Jackie), emphasize the repetitive sameness of Ray and Mirabelle’s affair.
Mr. Schwartzman, though on screen less, is certainly the comic foil and a welcome bright spot, as he should be. Without him, the movie would be bathed in a melancholy mist. His talent at playing lovably befuddled characters (Rushmore) is at a new level.
The story follows the trajectories of these three lonely souls as they try to connect. At the center is Mirabelle and her need to recognize who is offering her the real deal. Of course everyone goes about their search for the "right" one the wrong way. Their failures lead them to growth, to regret, or both, depending on how seriously they have examined why they make the choices they do, and how these choices affect others. Shopgirl is a poem about what a woman needs and, in turn, what a man needs too. Its moves are so classic, it could have been made as a silent film and still be understood. Wild and crazy has nothing to do with it.
Rated R. Contains some sexual content and brief language.

