The Hugh Grant Equation
Jan. 13th, 2003 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwyn Comments on Two Weeks Notice, and a few other movies
This past year I completely reversed my position on Hugh Grant. Outside of Four Weddings and a Funeral(and even then in smallish doses he grated), I didn’t really groove to his floppy English charm and the stuttering, stumbling quality that he seemed to rely on rather than acting. He handled the whole hooker thing well and earned my admiration, and then convinced me, with some hesitation, that the floppy thing could be interesting in Notting Hill, again so in Bridget Jones’s Diary with the extra twist of sleaze, but it wasn’t until About a Boy that I completely reversed my anti-Hugh position. Enough so that when ads for Two Weeks Notice came out, I wanted to see it in a theatre instead of renting the disc later, and this weekend I finally got the chance to get out there and enjoy a little Hughness (plus my copy of About a Boy just shipped — yay!).
About a Boy took his whole charm-based persona and flipped it right around, giving him a character who frequently was detestable but whose underlying charm made it easier to get away with his detestable actions. In the past Grant’s played horrible characters, but they were presented more as sleazes and reprobates, whereas Will in About a Boy was really a much more complex person, with Secret Underlying Depths that he’d never had to tap, and didn’t want to know he could tap. He really captured the essence of the book’s character, and the book is one of my favorites, as so many of Nick Hornby’s are. I had great trepidation that he could pull it off — that anyone could pull Will off, really, but especially Hugh Grant. I was concerned that the creamy English charm would overpower Will’s anti-charm, and in the end give us the same character that Grant’s played a thousand times.
Nick Hornby digression: I’ve been crazy about his books since I first read Fever Pitch a million years ago (no small feat trying to get hold of it in this country, lemme tell you). The film version of this memoir, starring Colin Firth (oh, we saw the most horrid, frightening trailer of a movie with Colin! I cringed in terror), turns it into a basic love story and reduces Hornby’s obsession with football (soccer) and Arsenal in particular to a kind of amusing foible representative of the main character’s unwillingness to grow up. But Fever Pitch, aside from being about English football at a time when I was obsessed by it, too, is one of the most cogent, insightful, and accurate pieces I’ve ever read about the nature of being a fan, especially of being a fan with a critical faculty. Even though it’s about football, anyone in this world of fandom can identify with the behaviors he describes, and what I love about him is that he looks at this all very self-effacingly, even self-deprecatingly, and gets to what makes the obsessive fan nature so exasperating to others, and how it affects our relationships with non-fannish people.
He played off that theme by fictionalizing it and putting it into the obsessive world of music fandom later in High Fidelity, the second most cogent and perfectly realized book about fandom I’ve ever read. Rob is frequently an ass, has issues up the wazoo, and I always thought that outside of the fact that Hugh is very upper-class and too good looking (not that, you know, John Cusack is a dog!), he would have made the perfect Rob as much as he made the absolutely perfect Will. I didn’t hate the movie version, but I felt that they lost so much by moving it to Chicago, losing that specific working class North London feeling and the very area-specific things that made the characters who they were. Plus it seemed like the movie made them all too glam, but it was worth seeing just for the scene of Rob's dream conversation with Bruce Springsteen. If you’re going to get love advice, you should get it from The Boss, if you ask me. The sad thing about movie versions of his books, though, is that I feel like they often miss that core truth about how fans are and how we behave with others — it’s there, but it’s there less in a spirit of understanding than of sport. Hornby gets the minutiae and the cravings and the collecting thing that most fans have (his characters in Fidelity are always making “best of” lists of whatever insanely detailed and obscure category they can, for instance, or organizing record collections by bizarre criteria), but the movies have often glossed over it, I think.
Anyways, end of Hornby digression — I just frankly wish that, despite Colin, all of Hornby’s characters had been played by Grant, now. He seems like the perfect embodiment of his protagonists, even in a personal memoir translated to film.
So...TWN definitely played to that recent sort of recharacterization of Hugh Grant, I think, that’s come about since About a Boy. It’s a cute movie, and I loved that they totally redeemed what I thought would be the cliché ending of a romance by having a different final scene. It looked for certain that they were going for the chase down the street —> big kiss —> camera pulls away for crane shot of lovers in the city ending, and I was gagging at how they’d undercut the often biting humor of the movie by doing that, when instead they gave us Grant walking around discussing how terribly small her parents’ house was while she order Chinese food. Which was perfect. All through the movie the real-life friendship of Sandra Bullock and Grant really kept things moving along, lively and fun, and they have that charm together that comes from people who really seem to enjoy being around each other and playing off things they know. And Grant was downplaying his floppiness, almost mocking it at times, which worked both for the character and for him as a personality. About a Boy seems to have changed him, as if cutting his hair and having him put on the skin of a character who’s just like him in many ways, but who grows, really helped him grow, too.
I could have done without the toilet humor (honest to god, I’m afraid to go to comedies of any kind now, because they all have to have at least one bodily function scene or joke and I just really cannot take it), but outside of that, TWN was fun and charming, and in some ways, it almost felt like it might have come from a Hornby book — the hippie lawyer parents, the obsessive and annoying male lead, the high-strung female, the witticisms. And afterwards, I realized that I really hadn’t had all the issues with Hugh Grant that I’d thought — I remembered his hilarious Chopin in Impromptu, how understated (though floppily charming) he was in Sense and Sensibility, and then I started thinking that really, everyone has a Mickey Blue Eyes or a Nine Months in their resume, after all. So now I’ve come down firmly on the side of Hugh, whether he’s floppy or acerbic or self-deprecating or sleazy.
This past year I completely reversed my position on Hugh Grant. Outside of Four Weddings and a Funeral(and even then in smallish doses he grated), I didn’t really groove to his floppy English charm and the stuttering, stumbling quality that he seemed to rely on rather than acting. He handled the whole hooker thing well and earned my admiration, and then convinced me, with some hesitation, that the floppy thing could be interesting in Notting Hill, again so in Bridget Jones’s Diary with the extra twist of sleaze, but it wasn’t until About a Boy that I completely reversed my anti-Hugh position. Enough so that when ads for Two Weeks Notice came out, I wanted to see it in a theatre instead of renting the disc later, and this weekend I finally got the chance to get out there and enjoy a little Hughness (plus my copy of About a Boy just shipped — yay!).
About a Boy took his whole charm-based persona and flipped it right around, giving him a character who frequently was detestable but whose underlying charm made it easier to get away with his detestable actions. In the past Grant’s played horrible characters, but they were presented more as sleazes and reprobates, whereas Will in About a Boy was really a much more complex person, with Secret Underlying Depths that he’d never had to tap, and didn’t want to know he could tap. He really captured the essence of the book’s character, and the book is one of my favorites, as so many of Nick Hornby’s are. I had great trepidation that he could pull it off — that anyone could pull Will off, really, but especially Hugh Grant. I was concerned that the creamy English charm would overpower Will’s anti-charm, and in the end give us the same character that Grant’s played a thousand times.
Nick Hornby digression: I’ve been crazy about his books since I first read Fever Pitch a million years ago (no small feat trying to get hold of it in this country, lemme tell you). The film version of this memoir, starring Colin Firth (oh, we saw the most horrid, frightening trailer of a movie with Colin! I cringed in terror), turns it into a basic love story and reduces Hornby’s obsession with football (soccer) and Arsenal in particular to a kind of amusing foible representative of the main character’s unwillingness to grow up. But Fever Pitch, aside from being about English football at a time when I was obsessed by it, too, is one of the most cogent, insightful, and accurate pieces I’ve ever read about the nature of being a fan, especially of being a fan with a critical faculty. Even though it’s about football, anyone in this world of fandom can identify with the behaviors he describes, and what I love about him is that he looks at this all very self-effacingly, even self-deprecatingly, and gets to what makes the obsessive fan nature so exasperating to others, and how it affects our relationships with non-fannish people.
He played off that theme by fictionalizing it and putting it into the obsessive world of music fandom later in High Fidelity, the second most cogent and perfectly realized book about fandom I’ve ever read. Rob is frequently an ass, has issues up the wazoo, and I always thought that outside of the fact that Hugh is very upper-class and too good looking (not that, you know, John Cusack is a dog!), he would have made the perfect Rob as much as he made the absolutely perfect Will. I didn’t hate the movie version, but I felt that they lost so much by moving it to Chicago, losing that specific working class North London feeling and the very area-specific things that made the characters who they were. Plus it seemed like the movie made them all too glam, but it was worth seeing just for the scene of Rob's dream conversation with Bruce Springsteen. If you’re going to get love advice, you should get it from The Boss, if you ask me. The sad thing about movie versions of his books, though, is that I feel like they often miss that core truth about how fans are and how we behave with others — it’s there, but it’s there less in a spirit of understanding than of sport. Hornby gets the minutiae and the cravings and the collecting thing that most fans have (his characters in Fidelity are always making “best of” lists of whatever insanely detailed and obscure category they can, for instance, or organizing record collections by bizarre criteria), but the movies have often glossed over it, I think.
Anyways, end of Hornby digression — I just frankly wish that, despite Colin, all of Hornby’s characters had been played by Grant, now. He seems like the perfect embodiment of his protagonists, even in a personal memoir translated to film.
So...TWN definitely played to that recent sort of recharacterization of Hugh Grant, I think, that’s come about since About a Boy. It’s a cute movie, and I loved that they totally redeemed what I thought would be the cliché ending of a romance by having a different final scene. It looked for certain that they were going for the chase down the street —> big kiss —> camera pulls away for crane shot of lovers in the city ending, and I was gagging at how they’d undercut the often biting humor of the movie by doing that, when instead they gave us Grant walking around discussing how terribly small her parents’ house was while she order Chinese food. Which was perfect. All through the movie the real-life friendship of Sandra Bullock and Grant really kept things moving along, lively and fun, and they have that charm together that comes from people who really seem to enjoy being around each other and playing off things they know. And Grant was downplaying his floppiness, almost mocking it at times, which worked both for the character and for him as a personality. About a Boy seems to have changed him, as if cutting his hair and having him put on the skin of a character who’s just like him in many ways, but who grows, really helped him grow, too.
I could have done without the toilet humor (honest to god, I’m afraid to go to comedies of any kind now, because they all have to have at least one bodily function scene or joke and I just really cannot take it), but outside of that, TWN was fun and charming, and in some ways, it almost felt like it might have come from a Hornby book — the hippie lawyer parents, the obsessive and annoying male lead, the high-strung female, the witticisms. And afterwards, I realized that I really hadn’t had all the issues with Hugh Grant that I’d thought — I remembered his hilarious Chopin in Impromptu, how understated (though floppily charming) he was in Sense and Sensibility, and then I started thinking that really, everyone has a Mickey Blue Eyes or a Nine Months in their resume, after all. So now I’ve come down firmly on the side of Hugh, whether he’s floppy or acerbic or self-deprecating or sleazy.
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no subject
Date: 2003-01-14 12:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-01-14 09:00 am (UTC)You know, weirdly, I remember Priveleged. Not much about it, but I remember it vaguely.
Right now, my once-obsucre actor I'm trying to get used to being in the spotlight is Viggo Mortensen. I'm so happy he's finally broken through, but I also realize I may never see him in little gems like A Walk on the Moon again. I can hope, but... once they break through, they usually stay broken through, don't they? ;-)
no subject
Date: 2003-01-15 04:03 am (UTC)Hornby
Date: 2003-01-17 05:35 pm (UTC)Re: Hornby
Date: 2003-01-21 01:26 pm (UTC)And it's totally cool that you might have been persuaded from my li'l ol' LJ! Makes me glad I wrote down my babblings. ;-)