Damsels in Distress

Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.

It's been a long time since the toga-wrapped revolution of Animal House and the whole National Lampoon "slobs vs. snobs" gauntlet toss. Long enough that in Whit Stillman's long-awaited collegiate farce Damsels in Distress, his lead damsel can intone darkly about how at elite Seven Oaks college, "an atmosphere of male barbarism predominates," and we are meant to think the better of her for saying it. It's not that Stillman is trying to get away with some dire, Tom Wolfe-ian jeremiad about declining standards. Instead, he seems to want to upend the school-set comedy with his own brand of highly literate, quasi-conservative thoughtfulness (characters intoning about how much more interesting homosexuality used to be before wider societal acceptance, and so on) and splice it with a crisp and pastel-hued surrealism. It's Dadaism for the preppie set.

In this universe, TV and smartphones are nonexistent (once you notice their absence, it's as though there's more air in the scene) and everybody talks as though they're unaware anyone is listening. The campus is an idyll of columned buildings and tree-canopied quads, dotted with women in sweater sets and the occasional rampaging fraternity oaf (though even those tend to wear shirts and ties, rumpled though they may be). The leader of the film's botanically-named damsels is Violet (Greta Gerwig), a saucer-eyed and crook-mouthed undergrad who helps run (in spectacularly terrible fashion, it would seem) the campus suicide prevention center, just one of many good deeds she imagines herself doing throughout the day.

Violet has an elaborately structured philosophy of life that she imparts to the new girl on campus, Lily (Analeigh Tipton), with a gravity thoroughly at odds with her brightly colored outfits and puppies-and-sunshine optimism. Having ushered Lily into her group -- dumber-than-rocks Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and prissy Brit-snob Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) -- Violet lectures for much of the film's first fifteen minutes on everything from the spiritual importance of smells to her belief that women should always date men less attractive and stupider than they are. It just makes things less complicated. Lily isn't so sure, as she's juggling the attentions of a smart young businessman (Adam Brody) and a too-suave Frenchman (Hugo Becker), and Lily's boyfriend is stupid enough not to know what color his eyes are. But that's the film's outlook in general: fratboy dunderheads who would be vilified or heroicized elsewhere are here seen as little more than children; poor, polo-shirted rubes who need to be protected from themselves. Like The Last Days of Disco and Metropolitan, Stillman is more in tune with how his characters relate to each other and their surroundings than to the bare vestiges of plot that the screenplay scatters around (particularly carelessly, this time out). Unlike any of his earlier work, which specialized in an Edith Wharton-esque anthropological attention to societal detail, Damsels in Distress is neatly cleaved from reality. It's as though the cast of some wretched teens-gone-wild TV show (and indeed there are many bright-eyed alums of 90210, The O.C. and such in the cast) popped through into an alternate dimension where fraternities were named with Roman instead of Greek letters and students follow the long-dead heretical tradition of Catharism. There's little wrong with this on the surface. Gerwig, pert and perky yet somehow Eeyore-like, is as perfect a muse for Stillman's deadpan quips as he's found since working with Chris Eigeman. Witnesses the scenes where Violet discusses the correct plural of "doufus" is "doufuses" or "doufi" or declaims the importance of tap dancing as a suicide-prevention therapy. But while Stillman hasn't lost much of his spark for crisp rejoinders in the 14 years since his last film, he doesn't seem to have figured out what vessel to package them in. The film froths and bubbles with a sublimely skewed wit, but feels jammed together and arbitrary. Scenes fail to play out, subplots loaded with potential -- such as In the Loop's Zach Woods playing a preening, faux-cynical journalism student who initially seems to be a perfect foil for Violet's crackpot optimism -- fizzle out or are simply dropped. Meanwhile, the three dance scenes that end the film one after the other drain the conclusion of its zing. Stillman was close, very close to crafting a truly weird, pleasurable comedy of manners and madness where snobs don't battle the slobs, but rather minister to them. Damsels in Distress might not be the film it could have been, but it's certainly close enough. 

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