9/1/2023 0 Comments Reckless records high fidelityThe back-and-forth between Barry and Dick is established quickly and hilariously through their choice of music: Dick moping along to the new Belle & Sebastian, Barry whipping his tape across the room in favor of a mix that starts with Katrina & the Waves’ Walking on Sunshine. But Frears’ film does have the same arc toward maturity, compromise and a healthy adult relationship, and it also has the goofy friend types, Barry (Jack Black) and Dick (Todd Louiso), Rob’s comrades in musical snobbery. The 40-Year-Old Virgin wouldn’t come along for another five years – and that film and others from Judd Apatow and guests were a little more sweet than sour. In retrospect, High Fidelity was a sneakily dark kick-off to a decade where arrested development was the primary theme of comedies about white guys who didn’t have it together. What matters is that he’s never cared to listen to the women right in front of him. It’s the lowest moment for Rob in High Fidelity, funny only in the cavernous depths of blinkered self-absorption that is the true reason why he’s unlucky in love. She storms out but he’s elated: he’d dumped her, not the other way around as he’d remembered. When Rob catches up to that high-school girlfriend (Joelle Carter), the one who’d resisted his advances, he triggers the longstanding trauma of their breakup, which led to a sexual encounter with another boy she didn’t want (“it wasn’t rape because I said, ‘OK,’ but it wasn’t far off”) and put her off relationships through college. John Cusack and Iben Hjejle in High Fidelity. ![]() His first call to the mother of his grade-school make-out partner is a light preview of the petty narcissism to come – he wants her to know that he was “technically” her daughter’s first boyfriend, not the boy she would eventually marry – but it gets darker in a hurry. ![]() He thinks he’s gaining insight into his past – and passing it along to his confidants in the audience – but his behavior in the present is saying everything about why he’s so terrible with women. The brilliance of High Fidelity, carried over from Hornby’s funny, relentlessly self-deprecating book, is that we learn more about Rob from his mission to track down his former girlfriends than he ever learns about himself. That leaves Rob to go through his top five breakups, because he needs to figure out why he always gets dumped. His long-term girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle) is moving out, and while it’s tempting for a snob like him to brush off her career ambitions as selling out, in truth she left because he refused to change so much as a pair of socks for her. Here is a man who cannot get out of his own head, and it’s currently getting pumped with the music that fortified him since adolescence. ![]() The establishing shot in High Fidelity says everything: as we listen to You’re Gonna Miss Me by the 13th Floor Elevators played on Rob’s stereo – the soundtrack selections throughout remain impeccable – Frears follows the headphone cord to his back profile. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” The opening narration is potent: “Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. There’s a universal quality to guys like Rob Gordon (Fleming in the book), a breed of disaffected Americans and Brits who spent their youth marinating in “sad bastard” music from bands like the Smiths or the Cure, and later insulated themselves in college rock and obscure musical tributaries. The film version of High Fidelity has a strange, magical alchemy working for it: an American adaptation of a British novel, written by Americans (Cusack and his writing partners DV DeVincentis and Steve Pink, and Scott Rosenberg) and directed by a Briton (Stephen Frears), with the location shifted from London to the north side of Chicago. If anything, Rob’s journey through his romantic past reveals how little he’s learned or changed over time. But it doesn’t mean that we, the jury, are going to find him persuasive. As High Fidelity ticks through his “desert island, all-time top-five most memorable breakups”, Rob gets the opportunity to explain himself directly to the camera – an ingenious solution to the confessional first-person style of Hornby’s book. At roughly the same age Lloyd was out there escorting the valedictorian around a patch of grass in the parking lot, Rob was breaking up with his girlfriend for not yielding to his aggressive advances. ![]() At no point in his life has Rob possessed Lloyd’s earnestness, openness and emotional generosity. The Lloyd Dobler comparison doesn’t hold up much to scrutiny, however.
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