Ghost World Dir: Terry Zwigoff. Cast: Thora Birch, Steve Buscemi, Scarlett Johansson, Brad Renfro, Illeana Douglas Based on Daniel Clowes’ reality based comic book, the incredibly positive press reviews may have led you to believe that this would be a very clever and very funny study of teenage life, and not just another tacky quest for tacky sex ala American Pie, Road Trip et al. And it is far better than those aforementioned movies, being intelligent stuff, with complicated characters and believable situations, whilst the two attractive leads trot out many a pithy one liner to a superb soundtrack, a mix of blues, jazz and classical music. There isn’t really a plot, other than that of the trajectory of a summer in Birch’s Enid life as she attends summer school, and her relationship with Buscemi’s introverted music lover Seymour. Plans to get a job and move in with best friend Becky fail to come to fruition, all the while an answer to the tedium of small town life and the search for a place in life is looked for in a distinctly slacker-esque way.

Coming across like a static road movie, where our characters idly stroll from location to location in their suburban hell, Ghost World only partially works. Both Birch, Buscemi and Johansson are appealing leads at first, with Birch having perfected her disillusioned teenager, and Buscemi has never been more sympathetic. But it all feels a little aimless, and after the first hour, as the humour fades and the drama takes over, it becomes increasingly harder to care what happens to the characters. Perhaps what makes the situation worse is that Ghost World feels like a more upbeat version of Buscemi’s directorial debut Trees Lounge, but with the emphasis on it’s teenage characters rather than Buscemi, and it’s nowhere near as thought provoking or emotion evoking as that gem of a film. Zwigoff’s a fine director, who manages to capture the oddness of the movie’s tone well, but pace wise it suffers, and could easily have been thirty minutes shorter. Still, this is an intriguing and often amusing comedy, and much better than most films released in the last couple of months, and well worth catching – it’s just not quite as intelligent as it seems to think it is. Alex Finch.

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