The Art of Getting By (2011)

The Art of Getting By arrives from 2011, which in the chronology of social consciousness places it in the late Bronze Age. Gavin Wiesen's debut concerns George, a Manhattan prep school senior who has absorbed the fact of mortality and responded by not doing his homework. Emma Roberts plays Sally, a popular girl who recognizes his soul and devotes herself to drawing him out of it. The film premiered at Sundance under the title Homework, made two million dollars against a four million dollar budget, and was dismissed by critics who found the writing thin and the central pair familiar. They were correct on both counts.

The cultural inventory here is sparse. Marcus Carl Franklin and Blair Underwood appear in supporting roles, and the film neither comments on nor capitalizes on their presence, which is to say they are simply actors doing work. Sally is the manic pixie dream girl in her purest form, a young woman assembled entirely to thaw a withdrawn boy, and the critical consensus of the era flagged the construction without the film ever interrogating it. There is a mentor figure who paints and speaks of honesty and fear, and George's fixation on death gives the proceedings a faint philosophical hum. This is mood, not message. Nobody is being instructed.

What remains is a romance of affluent downtown melancholy, competently photographed and emotionally inert. There is no racial consciousness, no economic critique, no environmental concern, no inquiry into identity of any stripe. The film has no interest in the body, in the mind's wiring, or in rewriting the past. It asks only that we watch a sad boy become slightly less sad because a girl looked at him. As a specimen of progressive cultural sensibility, it is a null set, which is not a moral failing. It is merely a film from a different decade doing what films from that decade did, and doing it without distinction.