Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Chicky Kawaii.
GayAsXMas says the best movie about love in the aughts is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I can't really argue with his synthesis of the role technology and impermanence play in the way we love now:
Those moments of intimacy make up much of the core emotional framework of each person. Remove the memory of it, and you remove a vital part of yourself. The film brilliantly shows the narrowing of Joel's experiences as one by one his treasured memories are stolen along with the painful ones. He begins to realise that the ying and yang of his experience with Clementine, the challenge she represents to him is part of what makes being with her so rewarding. By acknowledging the complexity of his feelings for her, he also realises their depth and ultimately rebels against losing that part of himself.
In a similar, real-world way, the people on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, who are only too quick to delete friends and scrub references to past relationships are playing out a version of Joel's experience. Like hyperlinked readers flipping through websites, we can often find ourselves flipping through relationships, obsessed with the idea that our perfect mate is another click away. By both largely anticipating this trend and then literalising it in his screenplay, Kaufmann proves his prescience and his humanity.
But I'd nominate as an alternative 2005's Shopgirl, based on the novel by Steve Martin of the same name, and starring him as an older businessman who dates a depressed young artist (Claire Danes) hoping to avoid attachment, and Jason Schwarzman as a slacker who, in one of the most refreshing twists on the slacker-romances-hottie dynamic of the decade, woos the artist with purer intentions, but has to become an actual, legitimate grown-up person (not a fake grown-up like in Judd Apatow's movies) in order to be worthy of her. It's a lovely, quiet movie, a reminder of how fantastic Steve Martin is when he's not trying to be funny. Long before (500) Days of Summer, the movie had an intelligent view of Los Angeles as an actual city. And while the movie isn't about how technology's created for us, it is about how difficult it can be to be an adult, no matter your age. Whether you're working a job that supports your creative pursuits, barely working because you're uninterested, or wealthy, established, and divorced, it is equally possible to find yourself utterly marooned--and to deeply wound the person who moors you to a larger reality. I tend to think that's become increasingly true as the gaps between rich and poor become larger, as economic opportunities and the promise of fulfilling careers shrink for people of a certain age, as expectations for success, romantic attachment, and deportment depending on gender shift underneath us. Maybe these dilemmas are true in any age, but the scope of Los Angeles, the fixation on luxury, the impact of student loans, and the role of technology as an industry in making some people quite wealthy all feel strikingly contemporary.
The movie also has a script that isn't afraid to be...well, twee or mannered isn't the right term, but precise, and sentimental in a way that is also true. The voiceover narrative, spoken by Martin and largely drawn verbatim from his novel, transforms the movie into a fairy tale you can believe in, one that draws much more useful lessons than any Disney movie. The acting's also extremely good, partially because it doesn't happen at a very high pitch. Martin isn't trying to be wildly funny, Schwartzman's not falling all over himself to be eccentric, and Claire Danes, one of the last genuinely restrained actresses of her generation, misinterprets, withholds, demurs, and gives in beautifully. It's a love story that's really, fundamentally about growth, something Eternal Sunshine is as well, I think, and as such, it demands we be grown-ups to appreciate it.
Or you could just read the novella, which I highly recommend. I don't know a better, sadder, or more promising description of young adult life than this, which is also (in slightly edited form) the voiceover that begins the movie:
She moved from Vermont hoping to begin her life, and now she is stranded in the vast openness of L.A. She keeps working to make connections, but the pile of near misses is starting to overwhelm her. What Mirabelle needs is some omniscient voice to illuminate her and spotlight her, and to inform everyone that this one has value, this one over here, the one sitting in the bar by herself, and then to find her counterpart and bring him to her.
But that night, the voice does not come, and she quietly folds herself up and leaves the bar.
The voice is to come on Tuesday.Don't we all wish.