March 31, 2000

FILM REVIEW

`High Fidelity': The Trivially Hip: A Music Geek's Warped Love Life

---

Related Articles

The New York Times on the Web: Current Film

Forum

Join a Discussion on Current Film

---

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

	Melissa Moseley/Touchstone Pictures
	John Cusack in "High Fidelity."

hat is it about pop-chart rankings and baseball statistics that can turn a grown man into a talking encyclopedia who spits out prize trivia with the vehemence of a sidewalk prophet quoting scripture? Nearly two decades ago, Barry Levinson's "Diner," a movie drenched in late-50's nostalgia, touched knowingly on the adolescent male obsession with such things (the relative merits of Frank Sinatra versus Johnny Mathis, the B-sides and label credits of early rhythm-and-blues singles). Now we have "High Fidelity," Stephen Frears's witty, exquisitely fine-tuned screen adaptation of Nick Hornby's 1995 novel, whose narrator, Rob Gordon (John Cusack), is a walking data bank of pop-music lore.

The manager of Championship Vinyl, a Chicago record store that in addition to selling CD's, specializes in vinyl copies of hard-to-find albums, Rob also moonlights as a nightclub D.J. and small-time entrepreneur. He and his two music-fanatic clerks, Barry (Jack Black) and Dick (Todd Louiso), are so smug in their superior musical tastes that when a clueless middle-aged customer requests Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You" for his daughter's birthday, Barry jeers him out of the store.

Rob and his colleagues are so immersed in pop culture that they give the most important events of their lives hit-parade rankings. Early in the film, Rob, reflecting on his disastrous love life, announces that his recently departed girlfriend, Laura (Iben Hjejle), didn't make the list of his all-time top-five breakups. Addressing the camera, he proceeds to name the top five, beginning with his junior high school sweetheart, Alison (Shannon Stillo), and continuing with Penny (Joelle Carter), Charlie (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Sarah (Lili Taylor). Each breakup has its own vignette and flashback. Ultimately, Rob decides Laura qualifies after all, and ranks her No. 5 with a bullet. Trivia fanatics will note that the movie's list isn't identical to the novel's.

In fact, the movie has made many alterations from the book, the most significant being the story's relocation from England to the United States. Championship Vinyl is now in Chicago, not London. But despite the change of venue, the movie remains remarkably true to the novel's spirit. If the characters' musical obsessions don't precisely coincide with those of the novel, they haven't been softened. The esoterica Rob and his colleagues swap with such competitive zeal remains as specialized (and as accurate) as before. To them, the ultimate measure of a person's value is hip musical taste.

Even more sharply than the book, the movie evokes the turmoil of urban single life with a quirky mixture of confessional poignancy and dry, self-deflating humor. Rob's relationships -- with their petty grievances, arguments and small accumulated misunderstandings -- have a pulsing flesh-and-blood reality. The women in his life, by turns charming, impulsive and sexy, each in a different way, are no romantic pushovers. And in so precisely evoking the prickly intimacy of a loosely knit group of friends and lovers, the movie is a triumphant return to form for Mr. Frears, whose last film, the turgid modern western "The Hi-Lo Country," found him way out of his element.

"High Fidelity" is an equal triumph for Mr. Cusack, who wrote the script with three collaborators (D. V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink and Scott Rosenberg). Their screenplay, some of it taken directly from the novel's pages, shares the main character's musical passions but has enough perspective to recognize Rob's pop fanaticism as a sign of his arrested emotional development.

In his winning performance, Mr. Cusack finesses the tricky task of alternately telling his story to the camera as though he were talking to a friend, and living it. A master at projecting an easygoing camaraderie, he navigates the transitions with such an astonishing naturalness and fluency that you're almost unaware of them. At the same time, he makes Rob so charming that even when he behaves badly, our immediate impulse is to rationalize and forgive.

And the better we get to know Rob, the clearer it becomes that far from being a sad-sack loser at love with a lifelong pattern of being dumped, he tilts more toward being a sneaky commitment-phobic womanizer. When he finally tells us why Laura left him (the reasons are offered as another witty list), the behavior he owns up to with a disarming casualness isn't simply bad; it's appallingly insensitive.

Melissa Moseley/Touchstone Pictures
Same old song: from left, John Cusack, Jack Black, Todd Louiso and Tim Robbins at the record shop in "High Fidelity."

The movie's basic plot follows Rob's attempts to win back Laura, who to his chagrin becomes involved with her upstairs neighbor, Ian (Tim Robbins), a pompous expert in conflict resolution who flaunts an obnoxious New Age vocabulary. But even as Rob makes headway in his campaign, he slips into a casual affair with Marie De Salle (Lisa Bonet), a sultry up-and-coming singer with a taste for Peter Frampton songs, and pursues a budding flirtation with Caroline (Natasha Gregson Wagner), an admiring rock journalist.

Besides Mr. Cusack's Rob, the movie is sparked by more than half a dozen incisive performances. As Laura, Ms. Hjejle successfully walks a difficult tightrope between willfulness and vulnerability. Ms. Zeta-Jones's Charlie epitomizes a supercilious yuppie chauvinism of a particularly nasty sort, while Ms. Taylor's flailingly self-dramatic Sarah is a heat seeker after emotional distress. Joan Cusack has an acidly funny turn as Laura's best friend, Liz, a first-class scold.

Best of all are Mr. Louiso and Mr. Black as Rob's geeky partners in perpetual adolescence. Mr. Louiso's Dick is a quivering, bashful nerd waiting for a girl to appear in the store who recognizes him as her ideal man when shared musical tastes miraculously coincide. Mr. Black's Barry is Dick's opposite, a loudmouthed know-it-all who wields his musical taste with bullying defensiveness.

For all its finely calibrated emotions, "High Fidelity" (like "Diner") is a very small portrait of a hothouse world that even now is in the process of disappearing. Five years ago, when the novel came out, it seemed much more contemporary than it does today in the era of the computer nerd and MP3 downloads. There's finally no escaping the fact that the vinyl junkies the movie celebrates already seem like prehistoric relics. That said, "High Fidelity" gives these dinosaurs the most heartfelt and respectful valediction they could hope for.

"High Fidelity" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has sexual situations and some strong language.

HIGH FIDELITY

Directed by Stephen Frears; written by D.V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink, John Cusack and Scott Rosenberg, based on the book by Nick Hornby; director of photography, Seamus McGarvey; edited by Mick Audsley; music by Howard Shore; production designers, David Chapman and Therese DePrez; produced by Tim Bevan and Rudd Simmons; released by Touchstone Pictures. Running time: 107 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: John Cusack (Rob), Iben Hjejle (Laura), Todd Louiso (Dick), Jack Black (Barry), Lisa Bonet (Marie De Salle), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Charlie), Joan Cusack (Liz), Tim Robbins (Ian), Shannon Stillo (Alison), Joelle Carter (Penny), Lili Taylor (Sarah) and Natasha Gregson Wagner (Caroline).