Script Review: MIXTAPE
Simon looks at Stacey Menear's first script offering: MIXTAPE.
Synopsis: 13 year old girl; bullied, outcast and socially awkward, finds a mixtape that belonged to her deceased parents who she didn't know, accidentally destroys it, and uses the song list to find all the music. Buzz: Secured fourteen votes on this years Black List. Written by:Stacey MenearStarring:Chloe Moretz (Kick Ass, Let The Right One In ) Directed by:Seth Gordon (King of Kong, Four Christmases) Info: First draft, dated 14/08/09 (119 pages) Status: Movie securing finance.
I'm a sucker for music movies- from biopics like 24 Hour Party People and Nowhere Boy, to fictional fare likeVelvet Goldmine, and there is a special place reserved in my heart for those films that treat music fandom as it deserves, and overtly uses music to reflect the way people feel about each other (not just in the soundtrack).
Top of the list are Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, Taking Woodstock, and Almost Famous, and the delightful and astounding sections of American Psycho that is devoted to music rank pretty damn highly as well, so I have to admit that the premise of a girl seeking to find out the intimate details of the parents that fate robbed her of through their favourite music is a promising one. The subsequent development that Beverley herself begins to change as a direct result of her proximity with her parents' favourite music is a great one, especially for someone (like me) who whole-heartedly believes that art (and music very strongly) is one of the keys to realising one's self.
However, what immediately strikes before anything else, and in a simply literary critical way, are the over-ornate stage directions; obviously scriptwriter Stacey Menear is trying to put a noticeable imprint of herself into the script, but some of her more poetic lines will ultimately be lost in someone elses direction, and as elaborate and pleasant as some of the descriptive text is, metaphor doesnt work in stage direction at all.
The winter stars, impossibly big and bright, fill the sky. We gaze upon these ancient beacons of hope and inspiration; the same stars that stood witness to the birth of kings, inspired poets, gave hope to the hopeless. Then we trace a silver string of starlight down through the too-huge universe, to where this inspirational, ancient and magical light comes to rest on
Beer cans. Milwaukees Best to be specific.
While this is a clever little joke, and one that represents an analogy for the ultimate oxymoronic status of life (poetic beauty versus disgusting reality), it will be lost on screen because you cant make a stage direction visible to an audience without making it no longer a stage direction, and you have to presume that any director would discard as specific a stage direction as this when it ultimately means nothing to the rest of the movie. Commendable though it is for Menear to use her considerable writing skills to capture the reader from the very first, the problem is that the script reader is a tiny percentage of her ultimate target audience, and thus there is little need to be quite so elaborate.
Admittedly, others like QuentinTarantino use ornate stage directions, but the difference is that he is translating what he will ultimately be putting on screen into appropriate language; since what he writes, he mostly directs. The script writer's role is to tell the story, to offer a window into characters through their speech and through their discernible choices- the director then takes those facets and imprints the rest to complete the picture, painting the more intangible aspects of the story. To offer so specific a stage direction that is designed to make an audience feel an exact way (with no room for artistic imput from the director) seems a little impudent, and in fact leaves no space for a director at all. I blame Diablo Cody.
Having said all that, I was very impressed with the overall indie-ness of the thing. One thing that movies like Juno have added to the general film canon is a move away from the character-as-paradigm/analogy pattern that a lot of traditionally modelled movies still cling to. So characters mean something other than an idea that helps progress the plot.
Mixtape takes that idea and runs with it- the main characters are largely unique, living their own lives with their own problems- they are not mere furnishings in Beverley's own soap opera. There are also notable absences that seem at first like oversights, until you realise that the movie refuses to conform to what you might want it to- for instance there is no love interest, despite the film centring on pre-teen girls who are usually beheld as veritable smelting-pots of pent up sexual attraction these days (it seems you cant get moved now for some media-painted horror story of tweens-dressed-as-hookers). In an arena that has just recognised the best way to squeeze money out of this lucrative little sub-culture (Twilight, I'm looking squarely at you), it is refreshing to have ostensibly sexless female tween characters (there is a flicker at the end of he script, but it's not really important to the central premise other than as an indication of the characters growing up).
And while the characters might be flawed and quirky, they are definitely not personified symptoms- a rather unfortunate condition of certain modern indie films that deem psychological irregularities or idiosyncrasies as justifiable sole character traits: excellent though they are, Little Miss Sunshine, Juno and Brick are all guilty of it, no matter how post-modern or neo-modernist they like to think they are.
Some of the best moments centre on the collision of the culture of punk rock and characters that have had no access to that strange community, which through Beverleys quest to learn something about her parents from the mixtape becomes one of a few key narrative strands. Further pleasingly is Menear makes the mixtape up out of less obvious track choices- most of which 90% of the movie watching community wont have any knowledge of, so it's possible to learn the music, and what it might mean about her parents along with her. We can imagine why her parents loved the music same as she can, as the script offers no trace of the actual reasons in most cases, so it's an inclusive artistic decision. Well, either that, or Stacey Menear is one of those pretentious music snobs who likes only the dustiest records from the unbrowsed sections of the least visited record stores out of town because it's much cooler to be that way inclined.
There is a slight request for a suspension of belief a Beverley doesn't have a computer, and thus cannot spend twenty minutes searching for the tracks on iTunes (or even, God-forbid, one of those naughty peer 2 peer sharing sites I've heard rumours about) instead of having to undergo a kind of philosophical journey to the heart of herself instead. Wouldn't be much of a movie though, just a 13 year old girl trying to find a good quality version of lesser-known pre-new wave/ power pop music, while navigating away from the frankly appalling, cynically named files that are clearly just masquerading porn. So I can forgive Menear just this once.
Chloe Moretz is set to play Beverley. Somewhat typically of a teen self-realisation story (despite the pre-teen ages of the movies three central child characters), the plot is also furnished with quests for acceptance, and the inevitable social awkwardness that comes with puberty. In new friends Ellen and Nicky, Beverley finds her acceptance, and liberatingly finds that they all belong to luminosity- to the borderlines of normalcy that themselves gave birth to the kind of music that she is trying to find for her mixtape. In some of the best scenes- as I imagine them- Beverley uses the models of her friends' families to imagine her own parents, imposing their images over reality to try and find which scenario is the missing piece to her own little jigsaw.
The best description for the character dynamic I've read so far for the three Odd Girls comes from the excellent Script Shadow...
As people struggle to compare this to something for reference, I think the obvious example is going to be Ghost World. However in that film, the girls were under the delusional perception that they were hip and cool. Beverly and her friends have no such delusions. They know theyre the outcasts, the losers, the wannabes. And its that angle that gives them and the script so much charm. Theyre the true underdogs, and we desperately want for them to win.My only problem with the characters is their age- Beverley and Ellen are mostly the right age throughout, but Nikki seems far too advanced for her supposed 12 years, and I cant help but feel like they might have worked better as slightly older, maladjusted girls. But then, I freely accept that it would have been much more difficult to gloss over the conspicuous lack of any sexual tension in the movie, and it would have been an unnecessary distraction from the real heart of the narrative.
Seth Gordon is attached to direct. The other notable though slightly lesser plot strand is Beverleys grandmother Gails inability to deal with her daughters death, which manifests itself in her vehement unwillingness to watch her granddaughter make the same lifestyle choices as her somewhat wayward daughter had. The finale which sees Gail finally begin to deal with her daughter's death, and embrace Beverley's own lifestyle choices is a pretty heart-warming segment, and a good end to the movie.
There is a definitely relevant case, particularly in the segment devoted to the road trip to the Wes Kelly Band gig, and Beverleys visit to her paternal grandfather, for a comparison withMy Girl 2of all things, with Beverley seeking to find out who her dead parents were through not only the mixtape (Vadas anchor to her mother is the rather less tangible annotated brown paper bag), but also through seeking to meet people who had known her mother and father.
In a rather more post-modern twist though, and conversely to the sickly-sweet finale of My Girl 2, Beverley gains nothing from her physical journeys but rather learns more from her own existential emancipation thanks to the new music she is coming into contact with. The music is her key to unlocking who she is (as all Goths and Emos anywhere will reinforce through their own love affairs with angry guitar based tunage), which in turn allows her to challenge her grandmother to give up her own secrets about the tragic pair.
Long and short of it is, Mixtape is a pleasant indie movie from an undoubted new talent, and one that I will definitely be going to check out when it hits screens eventually, chiefly because of the way it deals with people through music.