Cinematic villains come in several predictable flavors: the capitalist (Avatar, The Muppets, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo); the war-monger (Avatar again, A Few Good Men, Platoon) the upper-class snob (Titanic, Harry Potter, The Lion King [Jeremy Irons’ Scar might be the first lion to attend Oxford]); the upper middle-class salesman (sometimes an asshole [Glengarry Glen Ross] and sometimes a fraudster [The Wolf of Wall Street]); and the entitled rich woman (101 Dalmations, Game of Thrones [not a film, but literally entitled]). If they are not the enemy, these archetypes are at the very least portrayed as boring buffoons who represent “the Establishment.” It is no surprise that writers and directors, part of society’s avant-garde, make this choice. West Los Angeles bursts with refugees from banal, suburban Midwestern childhoods.
It is from this collection of “types” that writer and director Whit Stillman selects the heroes for his first two films: Metropolitan and Barcelona. Along with The Last Days of Disco, these films constitute an unofficial trilogy. In the first film, the hero is Audrey (Carolyn Farina), a child of the upper-class soon to be off to college in Paris. The most sympathetic character in Barcelona, Ted Boynton (Taylor Nichols), revels in his life as a salesman (and defender of capitalism), which he considers to be much more than a simple vocation. The talented Chris Eigeman, a staple of Stillman films, does double duty: an upper-class snob in Metropolitan and a naval officer and massacrer of ants (more on that later) in Barcelona.
Metropolitan and Barcelona are fun and filled with joy. So are a lot of films. What sets them apart from typical Hollywood fare is the unique outlook of Whit Stillman. But that outlook is unique only in the sense that it differs from what a cinemagoer expects from a filmmaker. Quixotically, it is an outlook that both reflects middle-class values and stands amongst the upper-classes, looking down on the rest of us.
They say you should write what you know.
John Sterling Stillman, Whit’s father, served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and worked as a political appointee in John F. Kennedy’s Commerce department. Whit’s grandfather, James Stillman, was a prominent businessman, banker and capitalist. Whit attended three elite prep schools before following his father to Harvard. He then spent time as an editorial assistant at Doubleday Books in Manhattan and worked as a sales agent in Barcelona for Spanish filmmakers. One can hardly imagine a more fitting preparation for making films about the American elite.
Even in 1990, when Metropolitan was made, debutante balls were an anachronism. But Stillman loves the conspicuously old-fashioned. The setting is Christmas in Manhattan, vaguely described as “not so long ago,” but has the feel of the 1980s. In the opening scene, Audrey, child of the upper-class, runs into her bedroom in tears and collapses into bed after trying on a gown that is apparently not ball-worthy. It is an unsympathetic start to a character that turns out to be the most sympathetic of all.
Audrey and her upper-east side Manhattan friends (the “Sally Fowler Rat Pack”) are leaving a debutante ball and end up sharing a cab with Tom (Edward Clements). They all end up at an after-party at the aforementioned Sally Fowler’s parents’ swanky home. A middle-class denizen of the upper-west side, Tom doesn’t quite fit in. Stillman helps make this clear in a scene portraying Tom in a rush to return his rented tuxedo to avoid late fees and failing to do so because of the difficulty of getting to the shop via public transportation. It soon becomes clear that everyone else owns their tuxedo.
A Princeton student and devotee of Charles Fourier, a 19th century utopian socialist, Tom attended the ball on a lark and finds himself swept up in the social world of the Sally Fowler Rat Pack. Sally Fowler herself is forgettable, as the plot begins to center around Tom and Audrey, who are drawn to each other for different reasons.
Most of the action in the film centers around the after-parties at the Fowler home. Stillman provides the viewer with snippets from various conversations, cutting from one to another and back again. These conversations are the heart of the film. Though Tom and Audrey are at the center of the film’s plot, the parties provide a stage for two supporting actors to shine. Nick (Chris Eigeman) and Charlie (Taylor Nichols), two fully-paid-up members of the Manhattan upper-class, provide the vehicle for some of Stillman’s best writing (for which he received an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay).
Nick, an apologist for the upper-class, gets the film’s funniest lines. It’s for good reason. His pleasantly whiny (who knew there was such a thing?) delivery comes off as more humorous than obnoxious. And he appears earnest even when you know he is not fully honest. It is a character that Eigeman was born to play. Stillman apparently agreed. Eigeman plays a not-quite-as-upper-class version of that character in Barcelona.
Taylor Nichols eventually stutters his way into our hearts in Barcelona as Ted Boynton. His Charlie, though less sympathetic than Ted, exhibits a vulnerability and lack of confidence that makes the viewer wants to listen. He also is a vehicle for some of Stillman’s defense of the established order. During one of the aforementioned snippets of party conversation, Charlie gives a choppy, stutter-infused, though rousing, defense of the existence of God (despite not having had a religious experience himself).
He is also a consistent defender of capitalism and the existing social order, stuttering, “Yet it is precisely the – the bourgeoisie which is responsible for – well, for nearly everything good that has happened in our civilization over the past four centuries.” When he indicates disappointment in artists for not defending the bourgeoisie, Nick replies, “The surrealists were just a lot of social climbers.”
Tom, despite being a utopian socialist, is charmed by the balls and the after-parties. Stillman pokes fun at his defense of socialism throughout the film. As he leaves one party, a girl earnestly calls out, “Good luck with your Fourierism!” She says it in a tone reminiscent of “Good luck with your piano recital!”
When Nick is trying to convince Tom to come to more parties, he jokingly appeals to Tom’s socialist sensibilities: “If Thorstein Veblen were here, he’d tell you the same thing,” Nick says.
The interplay between the two characters often speaks to their clashing worldviews. When Tom remarks that he can’t believe Nick plays bridge, a game that is a cliché of bourgeois life, Nick replies, “That’s exactly why I play.” Tom’s transformation to the upper-class lifestyle reaches its peak when a partygoer accuses Tom of being an insider amongst the Sally Fowler crowd.
The plot is moved along by the romantic comingling of several of these characters. Audrey loves Tom, but Tom is stuck on his ex-girlfriend Serena, a notorious flirt. Meanwhile, Charlie has a crush on Audrey, leading him to dislike Tom out of jealousy. But the real villain of the story is the titled aristocrat Rick Von Sloneker (Will Kempe), whom Nick loathes due to tales of his misogynistic behavior toward multiple women. Von Sloneker has been dating Serena, giving Tom a reason to dislike him as well.
Von Sloneker is the only irredeemable villain in these two films. That Stillman picks a pony-tailed, vaguely European aristocrat as the worst of the worst shows there is an upper limit to his defense of the upper-class. One wonders how much of Stillman speaks through Nick’s voice when he says:
“The titled aristocracy are the scum of the earth. What really makes me furious is that you have a whole class of people, mostly Europeans, all looking down on me.”
When someone inquires about untitled aristocrats, he replies, “Well, I couldn’t despise them, could I? That would be self-hatred, which is unhealthy.”
Stillman knows that Metropolitan’s heroes are a dying breed. Framed next to Tom’s head as he sleeps in bed is a copy of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Tom and Charlie, having mended fences, go off to a bar lamenting that UHBs such as themselves (Urban Haute Bourgeousie: Charlie’s preferred term for preppies) are doomed to failure in life. But they strike up a conversation with an older UHB there who assures them that some do succeed.
Tom eventually figures out that he truly does love Audrey, but by that time she’s off to a party in the Hamptons at Von Sloneker’s place. Charlie joins Tom on a rescue expedition, resulting in the pair bursting through a door with Charlie exclaiming to Von Sloneker, “I warn you, he’s a Fourierist!”
But by that point in the film film, it’s no longer true.
“Yesterday I was thinking, maybe Fourier was a crank. His ideas completely unworkable,” Tom says.
In Barcelona (1994), Stillman takes the elements that worked so well in Metropolitan and expands them. The dialogue is taken to a whetstone for an even sharper bite. The roles of Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols are expanded as they become the film’s twin protagonists. Upper-class snob Nick from Metropolitan morphs into Fred Boynton, a naval officer sent to Barcelona to represent the U.S. 6th Fleet in preparation for their port visit. The sardonic wit stays the same, though Fred is less confident than Nick.
Stuttering Charlie becomes stuttering Ted Boynton, Fred’s only cousin. Like Charlie, Ted knows his limitations. Charlie knew that he didn’t have much of a chance with Audrey, and Ted, crossing time, space and character, has taken that to heart. Stillman gives him a peculiar but funny point-of-view: beautiful women are nothing but trouble, causing heartache and drama throughout life.
“Maybe by resolving to go out only with plain, or even rather homely girls, I can avoid all that,” Ted tells Cousin Fred. Fred is not impressed.
Fred and Ted are classic frenemies, having spent childhood summers together but developing an adversarial relationship. Fred is sensitive to Ted’s insinuations about his lack of intelligence and Ted still hasn’t forgiven Fred for never returning the canoe he borrowed at the lake when they were children. Ted is constantly wary of Fred’s complicated relationship with the truth. Fred doesn’t help the situation: he constantly tells women in Barcelona nightclubs that “under the apparently normal clothes [Ted] is wearing these narrow leather straps that draw taut…when he dances…”
The two are thrust together since Fred needs a place to stay while he arranges the fleet visit. They spend most of their free time interacting with the women who work at the Trade Fair. Ted works in sales for a company based in Chicago, which he considers to be much more than a job: it is his mission in life.
Unlike the upper-class Manhattan elite in Metropolitan, in Barcelona the Boynton cousins portray the upper-middle (or perhaps lower-upper?) class, City of Broad Shoulders version of America. Each man represents a different facet of establishment American values. Ted passionately embraces the culture of sales and the free-market ideas that accompany it. Dale Carnegie and other sales gurus are his philosophers. “The wisest and best salesman tells the truth about his product,” Fred opines in a soliloquy.
Ted’s enthusiastic embrace of sales mantras leads to what he calls the “facile ridicule of half-wits.” The camera cuts to Fred mocking that mantra: “Every day, in every way, I’m becoming a better Lieutenant Junior Grade,” he says cheerfully and repeatedly.
Ted, just like Taylor Nichol’s character in Metropolitan, embraces religion. As befits their adversarial relationship, Fred uses this to make fun of Ted. When Fred and his love interest Marta (Mira Sorvino) walk-in on Ted reading the bible while dancing to big band jazz music, Fred asks, “What is this, some strange Glenn Miller-based religious ceremony?”
“No, it’s Presbyterian,” Ted replies.
“Protestant churches are like this?” Marta asks innocently.
Where Ted represents capitalism, Fred represents American political ideals and military might. Early in the film, when Ted is giving Fred a tour of Barcelona, they happen upon anti-American graffiti exhorting America and NATO (“Yankee pigs go home”) to leave Spain. Fred uses a marker to change the Spanish word for “pig” to “deer,” asking Ted, “would you rather be called a ‘Yankee pig’ or ‘Yankee deer’?”
When told by Ted that there is a great deal of anti-NATO (“OTAN” in Spanish) feeling in Barcelona, Fred replies, “They’re against OTAN? What are they for? Soviet troops racing across Europe, eating all the croissants?”
It isn’t just that Stillman presents the cousins as representing American values, it’s that through their portrayal Stillman shows that he thinks they are in the right. When the local USO is bombed, Fred and Ted run to the scene and help rescue the survivors. Fred makes it clear where Stillman stands when he earnestly remarks to Ted, “And then there’s all the fighting for freedom, defending democracy, shining city on a hill stuff, which, as you know, I really buy.”
It’s not just the portrayal of Ted and Fred that clues us in to Stillman’s beliefs. The chief antagonist of the film is Ramon (Pep Munne), a rabidly anti-American journalist. He reports that Fred is a secret CIA agent and lectures other Spaniards on the wickedness of American foreign policy. Fred, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes not, manages to frequently inflame the opinions of the Spaniards he meets. During a picnic, Ted attempts to counter Ramon’s arguments by using a metaphor about American foreign policy in relation to the black and red ants that are crawling on the picnic blanket. After Ted’s logical and measured defense fails to placate Ramon, Fred asks, “Where are the red ants?” He then smashes them. Despite Fred’s ham-fisted actions, Stillman lets us know that Ramon is the real fool. He lectures the Spanish girls that hang on his every word with talk about the fascist American union called the “AFL-CIA.”
But Ramon is just as much the antagonist of Ted as well. He is a famous womanizer whose only god is beauty, in the form of the female figure. Ted, in his supposed pursuit of homely girls, has precisely the opposite philosophy. To top it off, Ramon lives with Monserrat (Tushka Bergen), Ted’s (very much not homely) love interest.
Much of the dramatic plot of the film centers around Ted and Fred navigating the drastically different sexual mores of Spanish women. Particularly for Ted, it is a minefield for which he is unprepared. Mira Sorvino and Tushka Bergen do an admirable job of portraying the sexually liberated foils to the prudish American and his loudmouthed cousin. The best lines are almost always saved for Nichols and Eigeman, but Sorvino shines when Stillman gives her a chance.
Stillman’s viewpoint is unique. But that wouldn’t be enough to make these films a success. In a cinematic world accustomed to heroes fighting against the establishment, it is a challenge to make the opposite happen in a way that doesn’t become an eye-rolling defense of the staid and the boring. The Establishment, the upper-class, the bourgeoisie, the free-marketeers: these are not people for whom audiences normally cheer. But Stillman builds a world that makes you like smarmy bastards, salesmen, rich girls and class-traitors. And that’s no easy feat.