Remember back to last week when I said how much I enjoyed Submarine? If you haven’t read that review, I suggest you do so and forget that this review exists. It is better for all of you to read about a much better film that is similar in story to the one I am about to talk about. Especially since the film I am about to review is easily one of the worst films of the year. Now that I have been up front with you guys, please feel free to go back to the homepage and find a different review. Abandon all hope ye who choose to read the review for the vile and out of touch film The Art of Getting By.
Much like last week’s Submarine, Art of Getting By is a story about privileged youths falling in love for the first time, but the comparisons stop there as the gap in quality is so great that it is like comparing Citizen Kane to a snuff film. The film is about a budding artist living in Manhattan named George (a now mostly grown up Freddie Highmore), a fledgling high school senior in danger of not graduating who has decided to stop caring about his life and become a fatalist. He reads Camus’ The Stranger at lunch, keeps saying he has nothing to say about life, smokes, and broods a lot. He connects with fellow smoker and free spirit Sally (Emma Roberts) and develops a crush on her that his fatalism will not allow him to act on. Things turn sour when Sally looks elsewhere for affection and turns to the much older Dustin (Michael Angarano), a slacker artist that George looks up to and admires.
The Art of Getting By is so disgustingly “indie” that I actually wondered if the entire enterprise wasn’t a Scary Movie style parody. It is absolutely mind boggling that anyone involved with this project read the material and thought this was a good idea. This is the kind of ”real world” that could only exist in the”reel” world. This is the kind of film where skeptical, but well intentioned authority figures (two of whom are played by Blair Underwood and Alicia Silverstone) give grandiose, retch inducing speeches begging George to reconsider his path. It is the kind of film where kids skip school to go to Louis Malle retrospectives while set to a sub-Explosions in the Sky style score and no less than 3 songs from The Shins. High school kids wax philosophical with lines so outlandish that a drunken Peter O’Toole couldn’t salvage anything out of them. Everyone in the film is so obsessed with money and status that Sofia Coppola would find them insufferable. When George’s mother, played by Rita Wilson, complains that her “debt has erased my credit” she weeps over that detail despite the fact that her marriage just ended and her son was just in a physical fight with his stepfather that caused him to run away for several days. It wasn’t even because emotion overcame her. Everything about the dissolution of her marriage is discussed calmly and matter of factly. The fact that her credit is gone, that is just the worst thing ever.
The film is insufferable right from the start, but I can still pinpoint the moment where I checked out entirely. It was the scene where Sally’s alcoholic mother began hitting on George in front of her daughter. It is a scene so deplorably and flatly handled that I honestly debated if I wanted to leave to go do my laundry or to start bashing my head on the seat back in front of me repeatedly. It doesn’t help that the film doesn’t have a single redeemable character that anyone in the audience could ever hope to identify with. Highmore is in way over his head here, struggling so badly with an American accent that he sounds like a disinterested Keanu Reeves. Roberts and Angarano try their damnedest to make sense of this mess, but it’s a bit like trying to fend of Jaws with a pair of tweezers. The three leads actually have scenes together that come maddeningly close to conveying actual emotions, but the work of writer/director Gavin Wiesen sabotages these few fleeting moments of interest by engaging in the kind of pseudointellectual twaddle that even high academics wouldn’t speak in real life, let alone high school students in Manhattan.
I wished I was anywhere else while watching The Art of Getting By. I began watching the background players instead of what was going on in the foreground. I wanted to follow them on the off chance that their exploits would have been better than this. Then I started hoping better movies would break out at a moments notice. Every time Roberts was on screen, I hoped that someone would get their throat slit a la Scream 4. Whenever the kids were getting drunk in a club, I hoped the brothers from A Night at the Roxbury just showed up to add spice and further incongruity (and yes, that is a better movie than this one is). When I saw a pointless slow motion shot of pigeons taking flight, I hoped a John Woo style shoot-out was on the horizon. I hoped for anything that wasn’t this.
The apex of my boredom came when I was actively admiring the craftsmanship that goes into making the curtains that masked either side of the screen. I briefly noticed on screen a pub that I had been to once while visiting New York City. Whiskey Town, just outside Greenwich Village, is a great place over on 3rd Street. The cynical part of me thought Wiesen simply used the bar because he thought it was named after a Ryan Adams project, but I did hope that someone involved in the production got a good drink there. I envy the person who got that drink because after The Art of Getting By, I certainly could have used several myself.
Rating: 
Rated PG
Cast: Freddie Highmore, Emma Roberts, Blair Underwood, Rita Wilson
Directed by: Gavin Wiesen
Top image: A scene from The Art of Getting By. Courtesy Fox Searchlight Films.
