Whit Stillman

(On Cable TV, February 2022) If ever you wondered what kind of film Woody Allen would have directed in 1990 had he been forty years younger, Metropolitan looks like a solid answer. A very dialogue-based, quasi-theatrical experience featuring preppy Manhattanites on the cusp of their true adulthood, it’s a film based on the accidental inclusion of a lower-class young man in rarefied social circles, and the tension, drama, conversations and ideas that spark from the ensemble cast of characters. Writer-director Whit Stillman makes his debut here, and the film’s threadbare production history is a succession of heroic filmmaking almost unexpectedly resulting in a solid movie. There’s a compelling rhythm to the dialogue of the young adults grasping at understanding the world and their place in it, especially as they feel that the once-structured society that was built for people like them in changing in ways they can’t predict. Some of the dialogue is charmingly naïve; other moments are simply compelling, as ideas build upon each other. The ensemble cast (still largely unfamiliar) makes a good go at the film’s blend of social concerns, romance, jealousy, drama, breakups, exits and desperate rescue. The film is at its strongest when it portrays Manhattan as a playground for aimless rich young people, creating a timeless sense of place and time that still works rather well. I wasn’t necessarily expecting to be swept up in Metropolitan’s very stylized execution, or characters that I would usually find annoying in a the-rich-aren’t-better-than-others way. But it works, and it works in a distinct way that has few equals… except perhaps Woody Allen in some of his films.