It’s been a great few years for Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley, and James Ponsoldt. Back in 2010 Teller turned a lot of heads by acting opposite Nicole Kidman in John Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole. In 2011 Woodley kicked the doors to the film industry in and made her presence known by acting opposite George Clooney in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. And just last year Ponsoldt proved himself to be a filmmaker to watch by making the addiction drama Smashed, which was really good, probably still needs to be seen by more people, and even won a special jury prize at Sundance. Given all of the talent and potential this trio has displayed, the fact that they’re all now teamed up to make this relationship drama, The Spectacular Now, makes it a movie that comes with a big set of expectations. And that’s not even factoring in that its screenplay was adapted by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, the writing team behind the cult hit (500) Days of Summer. Expectations, indeed.
The good news is that the film generally lives up to these expectations. The Spectacular Now is one part character piece one part coming of age relationship drama, and whether or not that’s something that’s in your wheelhouse, it gets put together with so much skill that it’s probably going to be worth your attention regardless. The basic story is that the school drunk, a fast-talker named Sutter (Teller), has recently experienced some relationship drama, but he gets a second chance at romance when a bender leads to him being woken up in the middle of a random stranger’s yard by the local invisible girl, Aimee (Woodley), who’s up early because she has to work her thoughtless mother’s paper route. A period of bonding, digging into each other’s emotional hangups, and eventual catharses follow. And it all works, because the film takes its time to introduce the characters, it makes sure you understand why they do what they do, and the actors make sure that you like them despite their faults.
So let’s get into the acting, because that’s generally the main attraction here. Teller is perfectly suited to the role he’s playing, because Sutter is something of a huckster who gets through life by running his motormouth and relying on his innate charisma to get him out of scrapes, and Teller is an actor who has made himself stand out in rather standard fare like the Footloose remake by relying on just such an innate charisma. In the past he’s used his natural charm as something of a life raft, but here he really gets a chance to showcase it. He’s an actor who has shown a penchant for dramatic work too—mostly in Rabbit Hole—and this role also gives him an opportunity to further flex those muscles. That might be understating it though. Honestly, he knocks his dramatic moments out of the park. If he keeps picking scripts as great as this to show off his talents, it’s only going to be a matter of time before he becomes a big star, even if he doesn’t quite look like the traditional leading man.
Woodley, similarly, is also perfectly suited to her role. Most of us have only seen her in The Descendants, and the reason that we loved her so much there is that she was able to project so much vulnerability and sweetness through the surface bravado of her rebellious character. Here any sort of bravado is thrown out the window and we’re tapping directly into her sweetness and vulnerability, and the result is a character who is so likable and so easy to root for that you just want to put her in your pocket. pet her head, and feed her table scraps all day. Woodley is already attached to enough future high profile projects that her stardom is essentially guaranteed, but even if it wasn’t, this performance would serve as the thing that made her as an actress.
The supporting performances here aren’t anything to sneeze at either. Brie Larson is another young one, but she also seems like she’s going to prove to be a very strong actress. She doesn’t get a whole lot to do here as Sutter’s ex-girlfriend, but the fact that she’s able to make us completely relate to who her character is and what she’s going through, despite the fact that she only gets a couple scenes to work with, is a pretty great case for what she’s going to have to offer when she does get bigger roles to work with in the future. For now though, she’s a really solid hand to help round out the supporting cast of a movie. And, of course, the same can be said of perennial hands Kyle Chandler and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who also show up and do strong work in this one. One has to at least appreciate The Spectacular Now for the talent that its performers put on display.
Of course, the best performances can only do so much to elevate bad material. If this was your typical teenage relationship drama—which are always anything but subtle—chances are Teller and Woodley would have only elevated things to mediocrity. The script here is really strong though, so you get a sort of symbiosis thing going on where the character development and the performances help each other out. Neustadter and Weber take the personality their (500) Days of Summer script showed, and they make what they did there a little better by creating characters who feel a lot more three dimensional and human than the perhaps too archetypical characters did there. Teller’s Sutter in particular is developed well enough to contain multitudes and contradictions, but still not come off as a muddled creation. He’s got real problems, and he’s struggling so viscerally between giving into self-destruction and finding a way to better himself that you really have no idea which way he’s going to end up going by the end of the film. There’s real tension in that, and it makes the narrative feel like it’s always being driven forward, even though this is anything but a plot-heavy movie.
There are a couple of small problems that keep you from walking out of The Spectacular Now feeling like you’ve seen something truly transcendent though. For one, there are so many instances of binge drinking, drinking and driving, and generally destructive behavior surrounding drinking throughout the film that it feels like the characters get off a little light in the end. That’s not to say that there aren’t any consequences to their behavior, but they’re not consequences that feel like they fully address what was set up. Serious addiction is on display here, but the film avoids having any real dialogue about addiction. If anything, the way getting sober gets treated here feels a little saccharine and naive, which is surprising considering Ponsoldt handled the subject of alcoholism so well in Smashed.
The end of the film contains one or two more scenes than it should have too, and ends up feeling more formulaic and predictable than you would have hoped for as a result. This leaves you walking out of the theater with a slightly bitter taste in your mouth, even though just a few minutes earlier the drama was banging on all cylinders and kicking your emotions into overdrive. These minor problems are clearly a small price to pay to see a movie about teenagers that’s affecting and actually has something to say though. I mean, there isn’t even a single gross-out joke anywhere in the whole film. Somebody should bake it a cake or something.
