The Art of Getting By Review: The Art of Getting the Audience to Drink the Kool-Aid

Oh, where do I start?!  First of all, I was a little skeptical of this movie when I realized that it was showing on screen 1, and screen 1 wasn’t at the front of the theater.  Then, when I arrived, only two other people were in the theater.  During scenarios like this, I can’t help but to think everyone else got it right and the three – final total, five – of us were the butt of some cinematic joke this weekend.  I am not, nor would I assume that the other moviegoers are, absentminded.  I read the preview.  According to IMDB.com, The Art of Getting By is about George (Freddie Highmore), “a lonely teen who’s made it all the way through his senior year without having done any real work,” so I thought it would be similar to a high school musical that I saw a few years ago entitled How To Succeed in Business By Doing Absolutely Nothing, which I thought would share a similar theme as the movie.  Being a high school teacher, I really wanted to see this tale because I could totally relate to students who breeze through the system without ever doing any work.  However, I quickly learned that imdb.com was too generous.

George is lazy.  No two ways about it.  George is a spoiled, lazy, over-privileged New York high school student who lives off the premise, “We live alone.  We die alone.  Everything else is just an illusion.” Sound depressing?  It was.  While I thought the story would be about his deft ability to hustle his teachers, one of whom is played by Alicia Silverstone, and friends into allowing him to advance through high school and enjoy a modicum of success without doing any of the real work himself, the title was the actual illusion. George’s story started off at the beginning of his senior year in a private high school with him not turning in his homework and being sent to the principal’s office.  At some point he wandered to the roof of his school where he sacrificed himself to take the punishment for fellow classmate Sally (Emma Roberts) who was smoking.   From there, their friendship developed.  She introduced him to her friends and her mom, Charlotte (Elizabeth Reaser), invited him to parties, and skipped school with him, where they learned George’s step-father had been lying to their family and going to a coffeehouse everyday instead of going to his office.  It is only when George was threatened by his principal, Mr. Martinson (Blair Underwood), with not graduating that he finally took some responsibility for his high school career and his future and did a year’s worth of class work in three weeks in order to graduate.

In an effort to find the silver lining in his gloomy cloud, I deduced that the title The Art of Getting By was to be taken quite literally since George was indeed an artist, thus, the movie could be seen as a metaphorical illustration of his abstract, almost gothic style of art that afforded him friends, a girlfriend, and high school success.  Like George’s art work, the scenes were disconnected and illogical.  The actions of the characters were only making sense in the mind of the artist, i.e. the director.  For instance, while no one in the audience is naïve enough to think that high school students do not smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, in what world do we sit around and pretend that is it acceptable for Charlotte to give Sally and George a beer and allow Sally to smoke with her?  Since they were in New York, I kept waiting for Olivia (Mariska Hargitay, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) and Elliot (Christopher Meloni, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) to walk into the house with a search warrant and arrest the mom for endangering the welfare of her child.  And while they’re at it, find another pair of handcuffs for George’s mom.  What parent in New York, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, or Seattle does not know where his or her child is on New Year’s Eve?  George left home, and met Sally at Zoe’s (Sasha Spielberg) apartment where she lived alone.  They went to a club where George got drunk, threw up outside, and passed out on the curb.  Sally woke him up, took him home, and nursed his hangover the next morning.  No frantic mother of George running through Time Square asking, “Where is my son?!”  No Amber Alert.  No incessant calls and texts to his pager.  I didn’t expect George’s mom to be Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier), but America has not gotten so liberal that parents are no longer concerned when their children don’t come home at night, let alone New Year’s Eve/Day.

Bring back Elliot and Olivia, because Charlotte needed another pair of cuffs for being a pedophile.  During their first meeting, she asked George if he was ticklish and then said, “Ticklish people make great lovers because every place on their body is an erogenous zone.”  Pump ya’ brakes, lady.  He’s in high school – the place where guys have bathroom competitions to see whose urine shoots higher.  Certain words, phrases, and allusions I don’t ‘ev-va’ mention to a high school student.  “Erogenous zone” is one of those phrases.  Again, neither George nor Sally barely batted an eye.  I felt like I was in the twilight zone.

Lastly, and I’m going to get off my cinematographic soapbox for the evening, George and Sally’s high school’s depiction made no sense.  Their private school was so small that graduation was held in the school’s broom closet – oops, gym – but when George saw Sally on the roof at the very beginning of the movie, he had no clue who she was.  Granted, George was a loner.  We drank that Kool-Aid, but his school is ‘yea’ big.  He was immediately drawn to her the first time he saw her on the roof, yet his senior year was his first time seeing her.  Come on.  There’s not enough powder left in the canister to get us to drink all that Kool-Aid, and I didn’t.

Images courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures and IMDbPro