Tag: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Movie Makers from the Margins: Lorene Scafaria

Written by Erin Fenner.
In a 2012 interview with Vulture, Lorene Scafaria said she is not afraid of “quirky.” And why should she be? Indie-wood’s model to movie making seems to be dependent upon quirk. Whimsical women characters bring in the big money in the industry.

Michael Cera and Kat Dennings in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Scafaria wrote the screenplay for Nick and Norah’sInfinite Playlist, and I can forgive most of the quirk there. The dueling premises – rescuing a drunk friend and finding your favorite band at a mystery venue – worked to propel the narrative forward at a good pace. The growing optimism of the characters matched the lighthearted arc of the film. Most of the characters were palatable. It hardly passed the Bechdel test, unless you consider Norah’s (Kat Dennings) interactions with her drunk friend a conversation, but it did pass the GLAAD test by nonchalantly making an “all-gay” band Nick’s (Michael Cera) connection to underground music and his way to impress fellow music-lover, Norah.
What I am getting at here is: I am willing to forgive the over-abundance of quirk in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. But, I can’t be so lenient when it comes to the film Scafaria directed and wrote, Seeking a Friend for the End of theWorld.
Steve Carell and Keira Knightley in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

The concept is poignant and hilarious, viewing the end of the world through an intimate lens. It forgoes the heroics of a Michael Bay movie and instead inspects the day-to-day challenges of fast-approaching mortality asking: How do we grieve as a community and how do we live with each other when we know that we won’t live any longer?

And, for the first part of the film, that exploration is funny and tender. Dodge (Steve Carell) is a middle-aged insurance man who was left by his wife as the announcement that the end was nigh came over the radio waves. (As in: his wife [played by Carell’s actual wife, Nancy Carell] full-on bolts out the car door after the announcement finishes.)

Dodge’s life doesn’t appear to change too much. He’s bored with the job he continues to go to and interacts with his friends who still remain shallow. You think this might just turn into another existential metaphor for trudging through life – but don’t worry. Dodge meets his manic pixie dream girl, Penny (Keira Knightley), so we don’t need to worry about in-depth examinations because we have our fast-food route to a resolution: love.

Penny is wacky and sentimental. As she’s leaving her boyfriend and apartment she remembers to bring along a stack of records. She’s a hypersomniac; sleeping even while Dodge vacuums around her. She has the sort of bad luck that means, oh shoot, they’re always getting into tricky situations. Penny talks fast and cries expressively. Without her, Dodge would not be able to grasp at the meaning we all want him to find.

She’s the classic MPDG, not because of the quirk, but because she is primarily a male character’s tool for his personal self-discovery.

Their relationship could have been ok. They start out as co-adventurers seeking out their own resolution but, after they have sex one time in the heat of an orgy-escaping moment – we, the Pavloved audience (this is the scene where you ought to cry) – know that the characters are doomed to romance of the cheesiest kind.

Their need to find love in each other to resolve a film about the world ending reduces a crisis of humanity in the way that most American films reduce a crisis of humanity: focusing on the individual struggle of one person trying to connect with one other one person in the carnal way.

They don’t die alone, which is all they wanted after all. Crisis averted.

Scafaria’s lens is interesting at first. It does make sense that a woman director would look at a topic that has been explored from every exploding angle and find something else. But, she explores it in an ultimately sentimental oh-too-predictable way that leaves us with a content male character gazing at his MPDG as the end envelopes them.

‘Seeking a Friend for the End of the World’: The Perfect Setting for a Manic Pixie Dream Girl Love Story

Steve Carell and Keira Knightley in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, from writer–director Lorene Scafaria (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), is a charming and oddly pleasant romantic comedy set against the backdrop of the last three weeks before the Earth is destroyed by an asteroid’s impact. Unfortunately, Seeking a Friend seems to have missed its cultural moment: it not only comes on the heels of 2011’s limited-perspective apocalypse dramas Melancholia and 4:44 Last Day on Earth, but it unironically presents a quintessential Manic Pixie Dream Girl in the year of her deconstruction, from Zoe Kazan’s Ruby Sparks to Parker Posey’s character Liz on the television series Louie. 2012 phenomena aside, Seeking a Friend feels like it ought to have come out around the turn of the millennium, the last time the cultural collective was fixated on The End. As it is, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World feels hopelessly dated and out-of-touch. 
Steve Carell stars as the too-on-the-nose named Dodge, the Inhibited Sad Sack who needs Keira Knightley’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl Penny to deliver him from his lonely joyless life.  Penny is 100 proof MPDG, from her introduction where she literally throws herself into Dodge’s arms through his apartment window when he checks in on her during a apocalypse/breakup-induced crying session on the fire escape, to her seemingly serious medical condition that’s presented as quirky and precious (hypersomnia); her misplaced priorities (fleeing her home as a rioting mob descends, she grabs as many vinyl records as she can carry and screams to the others, “Goodbye, Friends!”) to her improbably sunny disposition (when Dodge tries to prompt her to think of things she won’t miss about the world, she even finds sympathy for her dentist).
Keira Knightley as Penny
It is unusual to find such a classic Manic Pixie in a film written by a woman, but at least Scafaria crafts Penny so that she has her own motivation outside of fixing what’s left of Dodge’s life.  After missing the last of the commercial flights to the UK where her family is, she agrees to help Dodge get to the home of his high school sweetheart in exchange for him taking her to “someone I used to know who has a plane.”  In one of the most touching scenes, Penny is able to contact her family via satellite phone (cell service has been discontinued for reasons I didn’t quite understand), and in that moment she seems like a real person with a real history, completely independent from Dodge or any other man.
But for the rest of the film (most notably, the conclusion), Penny seems to exist to save the spirits of Dodge. If Seeking a Friend for the End of the World were just a touch more artful, I would surmise it was using setting to further deconstruct the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Because what better time to meet an Manic Pixie than the last two weeks before the apocalypse, when everyone is acting on hedonist impulses, and long term consequences are not a concern?  At the end of most Manic Pixie Dream Girl films, the credits roll and the audience has to suppress cynical speculation as to how the rest of the MPDG and the Sad Sack’s relationship would play out, wondering how such a dynamic could possibly be sustained.  As Seeking a Friend for the End of the World fades to white, we’re free from these doubts.  Dodge and Penny’s whirlwind romance doesn’t have to work very hard to last until the end of time.