Critics reviews

It may be unfair to fault a fiction film for its lack of verisimilitude, but Metropolitan's cheap but resourceful cinematography and fly-on-the-wall view of an exclusive clique of upper-crust "insiders" gives the film a quasi-documentary feel, and it's no secret that the script draws heavily on Stillman's own college years. Stillman has said that he was trying to "preserve in amber" a real scene that he directly experienced, so I can't help but compare it to a later iteration of the same scene.

Stillman's film neither demolishes its pampered class nor indulges it in the manner of reactionary nostalgia like Downton Abbey. Metropolitan ends with three of its characters on a roadside, out of money, thumbing a ride, wiser and happier; it's a film about the wealthy that an agrarian socialist need not object to. Above all, it's a film that has lasted—changed, but lasted. It's good to have it, and Whit Stillman, back. Yachting brokerage's loss is cinema's gain.

Stillman would develop greater facility with the camera in later films (especially The Last Days Of Disco), but he's never topped Metropolitan's plethora of quotable lines, expertly delivered by a superb ensemble of unknowns (most of whom have stayed that way).

[Stillman's] debut, in the same mode but constraining itself entirely to manners, attractions, and subtle tinctures of class difference among a college-age but old-school group of Manhattan socialites, is at once his most inconsequential work, and his most fully serious. It's also perhaps the great cinematic depiction of the wintry, nostalgic climate and heady leisure time of New York City over the Christmas holiday.

If the plot suggests a kinder b-side to Luis Buñuel'sThe Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie — dismissed as an unfair portrait of the upper class by Charlie, who is far too earnest to go for such savage satire — what Stillman captures in this portrait of wan youth lounging and sparring together on fine couches is something rather more humane.

The degree to which Stillman's milieu qualifies as a Lost World, or merely a metamorphosed one, is ultimately unanswerable, but the bittersweet quality of the telling remains acute and pungent. The slight narrative is thus fortified, its manifestly hermetic scene made accessible with self-effacing humor and the musical quality of his language: characters who speak their minds, in complete sentences, a preemptive antidote to the indie/mumblecore revolution that was still to come.

Metropolitan, Stillman's first movie, is as unexpectedly irresistible as ever: funny, moving, and entertaining, with a wonderful cast of unknowns (who have remained unknown) and quite a number of ideas, served up seamlessly and unassumingly.

Stillman films these rounds of romance and jealousy, old mind-sets and new friendships, as scintillating dialectical jousts in which verbal blows take the place of action and leave lasting emotional wounds. His sensitive cinematic balance of performance, image, and inflection suggests a sensibility inspired, worthily, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Stillman's delineation and development of his characters is done with a sensitivity and intelligence that prevents them from being mere mouthpieces: beneath the layers of artifice, we can sense the beating of very real hearts.

For this critic, grown into a sentimental Protestantism if not one of faith, the palpable decency of Stillman's films, as much as his well-turned dialogues, is essential to my affection. After watching one of his movies I find myself wanting to be better—tiptoeing gingerly around tender feelings that I might otherwise stomp on, holding back on my drinking, and trying to be just a little more articulate.

Whether it's "accurate" or not, Whit Stillman's crafty independent feature about wealthy Park Avenue teenagers and a middle-class boy who joins their ranks over one Christmas vacation is certainly well imagined, and impressively acted by a cast of newcomers.