Movie Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
It helps that Wright is such a meticulous filmmaker. Shaun of the Dead is a funny comedy that also works as a zombie movie. Hot Fuzz is a parody of buddy cop movies that’s also a better buddy cop movie than most of the movies it spoofs. He seems to get that Scott Pilgrim doesn’t work unless we care about Scott as a character and still buy into the action sequences. It’s a tightrope act, because those fights draw from cartoon and video game conventions. So Lucas Lee punches Scott so hard he flies seven stories straight up, but Scott himself remains human, rather than a live-action Daffy Duck. The books provide an excellent template for the tone, but putting it on film still requires Wright to almost reinvent the wheel in terms of striking that balance.
I’m a huge fan of Michael Cera. There are very few TV characters who I love more than I love George Michael Bluth. Still, he wouldn’t have been my first choice for Scott Pilgrim. I pictured Scott as more, I don’t know, kinetic. But Cera just completely sells it – he nails the comedy, as you knew he would, but he makes the action scenes work. He grounds Scott in a way that a more outgoing portrayal wouldn’t. If Scott seems like the kind of guy who gets into fights, then you lose the comedy. As it is, that first moment when Cera jumps twenty feet into the air and executes a Dragon Punch straight out of Street Fighter 2 is completely unexpected and also hilarious.
The movie is just ridiculously well-cast – they’re all recognizable young actors who somehow have the pacing down. They sound the way that Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley’s dialogue sounds in my head. Kieran Culkin gets the best jokes as Scott’s gay roommate Wallace, though Alison Pill as the delightfully sour Kim Pine gives him a run for his money. Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) makes the most of he few scenes as Scott’s sister, and Ellen Wong is kind of heartbreaking as poor little Knives Chau.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Grindhouse) plays Ramona Flowers, the object of Scott’s affection. I like her performance, but I don’t think Ramona is fleshed out enough for her importance in the story. It’s possible that this is intentional though – maybe Scott falls in love before he really knows her well enough to tell if he loves her. Or maybe it’s meant to play off of the video game influences – we don’t really get to know Princess Toadstool or Zelda either. It’s certainly nothing that will inhibit your enjoyment, but at the end you may wonder why exactly Scott went through all this for her. Which, you know, might be exactly what they intended.
And then there are the evil exes. It did my heart good to see Arrested Development’s Mae Whitman battle her former TV boyfriend. Chris Evans seems to be channeling Ben Stiller’s character from Dodgeball, and it’s hilarious. His character is a big Hollywood action star, and every line he says just kills. Then there’s Brandon Routh as vegan Todd Ingram. Yeah, Michael Cera fights Superman. Routh plays him as maliciously dumb, and I had no idea the guy had it in him to be funny. And there’s Jason Schwartzman as Gideon Graves, the final evil ex. He is absolutely perfect – it’s the platonic ideal of Schwartzman roles. Gideon is a self-important douche with no moral center. He’s greasy and petty and in this world, he’s the biggest threat imaginable. The whole final sequence is stunning – it’s elaborate, clever, and ridiculous. There’s an incredibly intricate fight scene where you suddenly remember “I am watching Michael Cera and Jason Schwartzman in a fight scene.” It’s truly a beautiful world that we live in.
I don’t know that a comic book-based movie has ever played out this way, but the final volume of Scott Pilgrim was released just last week. Usually, movies are based around an ongoing character like Batman, or else they’re based on a finite series completed long before production of the movie, like Watchmen. This was a new experience, finding out how the series ends and seeing how the movie handles it in the same week. I understand Wright consulted with O’Malley on the end, which is why both versions feature climactic scenes involving flaming sword battles in Gideon’s hip nightclub.The final book, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour, is another excellent piece of work. Surprisingly, O’Malley scales back the wild action for a big chunk of the book – it opens after Ramona leaves Scott for Gideon, and the first seventy or so pages have Scott in a funk. He’s feeling sorry for himself and withdrawing, and acting exactly like anybody who has ever been dumped for reasons that they don’t understand. And then there’s the horrifying scenes where Scott decides to be a causal sex guy, only he’s really bad at it. All you can do is cringe.
Finest Hour gets more metaphysical than the movie, with Scott fighting a demonic Gideon on the astral plane, which plays out as an extended riff on The Legend of Zelda. The book also plays with the idea that Scott is an unreliable narrator, and maybe he’s not as blameless in the events that happened before the first book as we might have thought. It brings up the notion, absent from the movie, that we may be the heroes of our own stories, but we’re almost definitely the villain of somebody else’s.
The book allows Ramona more active role in the climax (though she gets some stuff done in the movie, too), which might be why she seems less fully realized in the movie – it’s just an inevitable comparison to the book that came out the same week. The movie completely leaves Scott’s ex, Envy Adams out of the climax – we don’t see her after the vegan battle. She ends up playing a key role in the book and getting a well-executed redemption. Again, this isn’t a flaw in the movie – when 1200 pages of comics turn into film, some things are going to have to get scaled back. Emotionally, though, both versions hit very similar notes. They’re stories about growing up, and about the crazy-ass things you can do when you’re in love. More importantly perhaps, both the movie and the comic tell that story in an aggressively creative way.
I can’t pick one over the other, since both versions make such gleeful use of their respective mediums. Both are fun and perfectly executed, and incredibly fulfilling. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the kind of movie that gives you a jolt when you realize you’re seeing things that you haven’t seen done in a movie before. It’s relentlessly likeable and ridiculously fun. And yes, it is awesome.
