I’m starting to think this is karma for having anything good to say about Cuties (yeah, don’t @ me, I’m not really in the mood for people being angry at a disturbing film for being disturbing). First there was Red Rocket, which hinged on a grown-ass man’s sexual relationship with a 17-going-on-18 year-old, and now we have a film about a 25-year-old woman and her romance with a 15-year-old boy. I would much rather not have to write about this and spare myself the mental gymnastics… fucking hell, even the notion that something like this would require mental gymnastics on my part is already making me feel sketchy; I don't want this to turn into another Breath. And yet, beyond my usual routine of writing about every new film I watch, there’s still a certain fascination that makes me want to get my thoughts down on paper because, honestly, I really liked this movie.
Let’s start at the top. After a chance encounter at the school of Gary Valentine (Cooper ‘son of Phillip Seymour’ Hoffman), photography assistant Alana (Alana Haim) becomes friends with him, and the film tracks their relationship as it develops. And yet, even with those two numbers looming very visibly over their heads during every interaction they have, this well and truly stays away from being as creepy as it sounds for two key reasons.
Firstly, there is no sex, or even the insinuation of sex, between these two, so it avoids being outright skeevy in its specifics. And secondly, their characters both act outside of their age range throughout. Gary is 15, but he’s also a working actor and owns and runs his own business, working together with Alana to sell water beds and, later on, opens a pinball arcade. Alana, on the other hand, feels cut from the same cloth as the average protagonist in a Judd Apatow film, as there’s plenty of arrested development going on here. The youngest of three sisters (with the rest of Haim showing up to fill those roles), she is quite impulsive and acts out in much the same way one would expect a teenager to in a similar scenario. As such, this becomes less directly about the age difference between the two characters, and more about the age difference between their actual age and their behaviour.
The ‘70s backdrop also adds to that effect, showing the transition from Old to New Hollywood as basically blurring out the idea of age entirely. The kids are acting like responsible adults, and all the adults act like reckless teenagers. The supporting cast does a lot to bolster that impression, from Sean Penn as ‘Jack’ (based on William) Holden riding his motorcycle over a fire pit on a golf course, to John Michael Higgins’ Jerry Frick as the most casually racist man in Hollywood (and the joke being squarely on him in the process), to Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters. Yes, the same Jon Peters who wanted Superman to fight a giant spider; he’s in this movie too, and Cooper plays him so delightfully unhinged that he somehow overcomes his Kevin Smith-adjacent place in the pop culture consciousness. Hell, Christine Ebersole’s early appearance as a stand-in for Lucille Ball, truth be told, does better with the character in the space of a few minutes than Nicole Kidman did in over two hours. And she even played her the exact same way.
And in that haziness along maturity lines, it got me to thinking about my own experiences concerning my age against everyone else’s in everyday life. I am, at the time of writing, 26 years old, and I’d say that I look about my age… except I’ve looked this way since I was at least 14. Not only that, I started mainstream schooling about a year earlier than everyone else in my year, so I usually ended up looking the oldest, and yet being the youngest in my peer group. Then there’s my general social issues growing up, which usually resulted in me not making as many friends among my own age group, but getting on reasonably well with my parents’ friends. And there’s also the autistic side of the equation, where having a developmental disorder meant that I matured at a different rate to everyone else, being slower in some areas while being much faster in others.
To put things a little more simply, the age difference between the two leads in this film is about the same as the difference between my mental age and my physical age over… pretty much my entire life. I don’t have the strongest opinion on that kind of divide just from my own experiences, but then again, those same experiences don’t exactly make me a reasonable authority in such matters.
Even outside of my personal perspective, what the film itself delves into regarding the age divide leads to some pretty interesting ideas. It basically throws up a big question mark in regards to maturity when it comes to approaching relationships, romantic or otherwise. It’s a repeated notion that I keep seeing in the more misty-eyed romance flicks out there, where the general attitude against such couplings largely comes down to ‘real love doesn’t exist’ and the ideal of romantic love as something one is supposed to grow out of. Because wanting to find someone you want to spend time with rather than having to do so out of professional obligations is an immature fantasy, but going full ‘middle-aged man with a motorcycle’ stereotype? Getting ready to smack a younger co-star for embarrassing them on-stage? Threatening to kill a kid’s family if they mess up installing a water bed? This is adult behaviour? Maybe we need to reassess what does and what doesn’t need ‘growing out’ of.
Look, I get it; all the rationalisations I put on here aren’t going to automatically make this okay for some audiences. Hell, if this truly was as gross as its own synopsis made it appear, I would have been first in line to slam it because I get very annoyed with how these sorts of relationships are usually depicted in the mainstream (Older man with younger girl is creepy, yet older woman with younger boy merits a high-five?). But this is just so utterly devoid of cynicism, or ugliness, or even the kind of nostalgia that would pull this into “it was just a different time” bullshit, that the coming-of-age romance at its core ends up working for the better. I don’t know how much this really adheres to reality (Gary himself is based on producer Gary Goetzman), but as a work of once-removed fiction that asks questions about maturity and why certain wants and needs get relegated to just being kids’ stuff, I’d say it succeeds. I mean, it’s still not as fucked-up as the last romantic movie Paul Thomas Anderson made, that’s for damn sure.
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