Film Reviews

The Art Of Getting By

• Rating:
• Director: Gavin Wiesen
• Starring: Emma Roberts
• Details: US / 83mins (12A).

Busting its gut to be 'Best Indie Teen Movie 2011', The Art Of Getting By is too wrapped up in its own self-importance and pretension to allow its well-meaning message to shine through: kids, knuckle down at school and the world will be your oyster.
Highmore plays George, an existential seventeen-year-old who prefers reading Camus and listening to Leonard Cohen than going to school, doing his homework, or realising his potential in art. Just as he's about to disappear into the safety of his black trench coat forever, he takes a shine to Sally (Roberts), a popular rich girl from his class. Although a brilliant student, George is threatened with failure to graduate if he doesn't do his homework but he doesn't have time for that now: he's experiencing love for the first time...
It sounds like it could have been a good 'un, something akin to Say Anything, but no. Flat and hollow, nothing here rings true. Maybe teens read Camus, listen to Leonard Cohen and reference Basquiat. Maybe teens really say things like, "I'm overwhelmed with sadness," "I'm nostalgic for the present "and "derivative". Maybe teens really go to dinner with each other in a restaurant. I've never come across them, but if you have and see a kindred spirit in George then go, enjoy, wallow in The Art Of Getting By.
Typical of filmmakers trying too hard to be the opposite of American Pie, they forget what it's like to be a teenager; first time director Gavin Wiesen, who also wrote the script, looks back on his schooldays here with misty-eyed nostalgia. I don't know Wiesen but my guess is his surrogate George wasn't as smart or morose or as talented as he's portrayed here. And girls like Sally wouldn't want anything to do with him. But this is male fantasy, not reality. This is correcting the past, not showing it. Wiesen heaps too much maturity on George's young shoulders: his face says he's seventeen, while his dialogue and his outlook on life says he's thirty-five.
It's hard to get a handle on Emma Roberts' Sally, the only other character here worth talking about. Wiesen works hard to make her more than just an object of desire, which is all girls really amount to in teen movies seen from the boy's point of view, and that's commendable. However, her flirtatious single mother and her attraction to artist Dustin (Angarano) feel thrown together. These elements of Sally's life don't affect her character and neither do they affect Roberts' performance. She's unsure how to play Sally and her default pose is too look sympathetically into Highmore's eyes. Highmore, for his part, stands about smoking cigarettes with a hint of a tear in his eye... for the entire film.
It could have been a decent one but The Art of Getting By is too much in love with itself.

Review by Gavin Burke