High Fidelity (2000)

High Fidelity arrives from the year 2000, a romantic comedy about a man cataloging his own failures in five-part lists, and it carries itself with the confidence of someone who has never once been asked to justify an opinion. Rob Gordon runs a Chicago record store, argues about pop music with his employees, and speaks directly into the camera about his ex-girlfriends. The film is warm, funny, and entirely comfortable in its own skin. There is no project here. There is a man, a breakup, and a stack of vinyl.

On the matter of representation, Lisa Bonet appears as the singer Marie DeSalle, and the ensemble is varied in a way that never announces itself. Race is simply present and never discussed, which is to say the film has no racial program to speak of. Sara Gilbert, Lili Taylor, and Joelle Carter fill out a cast of women who exist as people first and demographics never. Penny Hardwick eventually corrects Rob's self-serving account of their breakup, which is the closest the film comes to a feminist gesture. It is a small correction. Rob remains the center of gravity throughout.

Elsewhere we find only whispers. The clerks sneer at corporate taste and celebrate obscure vinyl, a posture that flirts with anti-commercial resentment without ever mounting an argument about money or class. Rob's confessional narration is personal and wounded, not preachy; he lectures no one about society. The film asks nothing of its audience except patience with an overgrown adolescent. That it remains charming is its achievement. That it aspires to nothing grander is its character.