Uma Thurman in an ice fishing hut...what could be better?

If I'm going to talk about "going home" movies, or high school reunion movies, it's clear that I cannot neglect Beautiful Girls. Of course, the "going home" that takes place for Timothy Hutton's character is almost wholly different from what Martin Blank experiences in Grosse Pointe Blank. In Beautiful Girls, Willie (Hutton's character), goes home to a small town that seems to be populated almost entirely by his old friends from high school. He has remarkably interesting conversations with these people about all sorts of bigtime topics, and there are still old conflicts playing out that date from the high school days. And, as a huge bonus, this teenage girl named Marty (played by Natalie Portman) now lives in town and an old friend's cousin Andera (played by Uma Thurman) is visiting. So not only is Willie's old world still intact and populated by these interesting people from the good old days who still seem to have endless things to talk about together, there's the novelty of two new and equally interesting people. This sort of thing might seem a bit unrealistic to me because my hometown is completely devoid of such things, but perhaps it still exists in small towns like the one in Beautiful Girls. To me, the world of this film is at once quite depressing yet wonderfully comforting and appealing.

The depressing part, I think, starts with what Willie's childhood home has become. His father seems practically comatose (see the scene in which he asks Willie to watch some golf with him), and his brother is caught up in some sort of vulgar, adolescent funk. As Marty says, Willie's brother is missing "that thing that having a mom gives you." Clearly, this isn't much of a home to come back to. And then, there's the twofold reason for Willie's visit home. His career as a pianist in New York City isn't going well enough, and he's been offered a sales position. So he's come home to ponder "what he's going to do for the rest of his life" as well as whether or not he's going to marry this girl he's been seeing seriously in the City. I suppose that this mid-life crisis-like situation is rather depressing as well, but at least Willie has this fully-realized world of the past to revisit in order to decide what to do.

And what a great world it seems to be. I wish I could go back to Bethel Park and have such great conversations with interesting people I used to know from high school. One of the particular conversations from Beautiful Girls that sticks out in my head is the one between Willie and Paul (played by Michael Rapaport) during which Paul goes off on his monologue about supermodels. He says that they're bottled promise, promise of a new day, promise of a better time, etc. Of course, this comes off in the film sounding creepy and pathetic, but I seem to remember something about this from my college and high school days. In my bedroom or dormroom, I always had a picture or two of Natalie Portman up on my walls. I'd look at it for something like inspiration. She's so damn cute in some of those pictures, and then she's remarkably talented and intelligent as evidenced by her body of film work and her matriculation at Harvard. At the risk of sounding awfully tacky and sentimental, those little pictures of her got me through some tough study days and rough times. Am I the only one who's ever actually practiced this sort of quintessentially American thing? Did any of you do something similar? So anyway, for me, Natalie Portman served something like the same function that Paul's supermodels served for him in Beautiful Girls. Is that creepy?

And also, what about the little ice fishing date Willie has with Andera? They have this great conversation about how the grass is always greener on the other side relationshipwise, and I can't help thinking that it's true on some level. Familiarity seems to breed discontent for so many, such that after a person is in a stable relationship for a long time, he or she begins to get bored or "look around" as they say. But there's always someone else looking at that significant other of which person A is bored, thinking, "wow," and wishing he or she were in the so-called boring situation. But probably having that nice, crisp little conversation with Uma Thurman in an ice fishing hut would keep any "bored" man sane and happy.