Pop Pop, Fizz Fizz



He is crazy for records: Cusack and Hjejle fine-tune High Fidelity

High Fidelity lets the air out of Nick Hornby’s novel.

by Sam Adams

High Fidelity

Directed by Stephen Frears
A Touchstone release
Opens Friday at area theaters

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity is a three-minute pop song of a novel — or rather, it’s like the songs musicians start to write when they feel they’ve "outgrown" pop music: a minor chord here, an unrhymed lyric there, but underneath it’s still boy-loves-girl. It isn’t a great novel, but it does something that even great novels rarely do: It commits to paper an entire, wholly recognizable subculture that no one had ever gotten around to putting down on paper before. There are lots of rock ’n’ roll novels, of course, but as far as I know, no other novels about the people who read rock ’n’ roll novels, the ones who seek out pricey Japanese imports with alternate mixes, who befriend record store clerks so they can be trusted to put aside that special release, who’ll drop 50 bucks on a seven-inch single because it has a different cover than the one they’ve already got. It reminded me unavoidably of a scene from one of the early Sandman comics, set at a convention of serial killers. Two killers are discussing The Collector, the novel about a man who goes from collecting butterflies to collecting women. "A remarkable novel," comments one to the other. "When I first read that book, I thought — for the first time, I am understood."

Hornby wanted it to be more, of course. In interviews, he complained that the book wasn’t about record collectors at all, but about 35-year-old men whose lives were so empty they had to be filled with colored vinyl and bootleg CDs, who had more meaningful relationships with records than they did with women. But the novel only resonates on the level of pop; Hornby’s as awkward at human relations as he is agile with the world of dusty record store racks. Rob, High Fidelity’s record store-owning protagonist, is a stereotypical commitment-phobe in his mid-30s, a character as thin as Maxim’s paper stock. Dividing his life into Top Five lists, getting dumped by girlfriend after girlfriend for reasons he can’t understand, he’s both pathetic and all-too-recognizable, a cardboard cutout that still cuts close to home.

High Fidelity the movie is the opposite of High Fidelity the book; it gets the emotional parts right and the pop parts wrong. Reconceived as a vehicle for John Cusack, the story is more about Rob’s character than the milieu that surrounds him, which is definitely a mixed blessing. Without the pop lust of Hornby’s book, the movie sometimes feels flat and generic, as if Rob could just as easily be obsessed with baseball cards or figurines. Despite the sterling choice of soundtrack music — The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Velvet Underground, Love, Stereolab, The Kinks, Brother JT — there’s no love in Rob’s musical obsession. There’s nothing in High Fidelity to rival the moment in Say Anything… when Cusack launched a million high school crushes by wooing Ione Skye with "In Your Eyes"; Rob may be in love with music, but High Fidelity isn’t.

And High Fidelity doesn’t have the zest of Grosse Point Blank, which like High Fidelity was retooled from an existing script by Cusack and writing partners Steve Pink and D.V. DeVincentis. Despite the immense zeal with which Jack Black and Todd Louiso attack the parts of Rob’s record store pals, Cusack’s lead performance is too mopey to give the film the drive it needs; he so badly cries out for acceptance that we’re not inclined to give it to him. The actor who created cinema’s most adorable contract killer here comes off as, well, a bit of a noodge.

As in Grosse Pointe Blank (and, to a lesser extent, Pushing Tin), Cusack’s High Fidelity character is a boy who won’t grow up, paralyzed by fear of adult responsibilities. As High Fidelity opens, Rob is in the middle of being walked out on by Laura (Iben Hjejle), his live-in girlfriend of several years. As she storms out the door, Rob turns to the camera (which he does altogether too often) and immediately launches into his "Top Five All-Time Breakups" list, the point being that they do not and never will include her.



	*What kind of man reads Magnet?* John Cusack

Of course, his fit of bravado doesn’t last, and before long Rob’s in a major funk. The end of his relationship with Laura starts him on an uncharacteristic voyage of self-discovery which entails rehashing all the failed relationships in the Top Five, and looking up as many old girlfriends as he can find. The cavalcade of painful memories has a happy end, as Rob discovers the ultra-cool girlfriend (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who threw him over for an ad exec is really a pretentious egotist, and the head case (Lili Taylor) who dumped him is back to being single and miserable. But when you see the pleasure Rob takes in his exes’ downfalls, it starts to dawn on you that maybe you don’t like this guy so much.

Though it’s still set in the world of pop culture connoisseurs, High Fidelity doesn’t have the novel’s satiric sheen, which means that instead of being a deliberately inflated caricature of a self-centered, immature prick, Rob is just a self-centered, immature prick. When High Fidelity turns into a story about real people instead of pop archetypes, things get unpleasant but quick. And the more ardently Rob pursues Laura, the more you start wondering whether the happy ending would be if they got back together or if they didn’t.

Of course, Rob isn’t nearly as annoying as Barry (Jack Black), the corpulent anti-socialite who mans the record-store counter like he’s warding off infidels. But Black, who’s best known as half of the mock-rock group Tenacious D, is so unapologetically sociopathic you can’t help but warm to him. Withholding desperately needed records from customers just because he doesn’t like them, he’s the kind of hopelessly malicious guy you have to be friends with just to make sure you stay on his good side. (Todd Louiso’s meek, bald-headed, Belle and Sebastian-listening Dick is just as endearing for the opposite reasons.) Barry may be psychotic, but at least he’s not a whiner.

Cusack seemed as if he was born to play Rob, but there’s none of the guilelessness that made his performances in Say Anything… and Grosse Pointe Blank touchstones for a generation (even if they don’t all know it). What Lloyd Dobler and Martin Blank have in common is that they’re both driven by ideals, even if they can’t really say what they are. But because we never see what drives Rob to stockpile records — other than that making mix tapes is a good way to get chicks — he really seems like the aimless slacker Laura accuses him of being. It’s as if Lloyd Dobler got dumped by Ione Skye, and never got around to replacing the batteries in that boombox.