The Case Against Nonconformity
posted on Wednesday, November 04, 2009 in Movie Reviews
All About Steve might be the worst movie in Sandra Bullock’s body of work. While Bullock has never been considered much of a serious artist, there’s often an odd sincerity to her work that makes everything palatable. It is this sincerity that is missing in All About Steve, producing perhaps one of the most misguided attempts to promote the idea of nonconformity. It is a whirlwind of bad ideas passed off as quirk, mostly resulting in a whole lot of irritating behavior. Mary Horowitz (Sandra Bullock) is an awkward crossword puzzle constructor who gets set up on a blind date by her parents. That date turns out to be Steve (Bradley Cooper), a cameraman for a national news network. Mary is immediately convinced that she’s meant to be with Steve, but Steve is turned off by Mary’s clinginess and her general weirdness. Feigning a news emergency, Steves runs off and ditches her, thinking he’d never see her again. But Mary proves to be more persistent than that, following Steve to every news story he covers. Egged on by Steve’s coworkers, Mary braves storms, rallies support, and falls into an abandoned mine, all in the name of misguided love.
The film is perhaps the most succinct argument being “unique” or “quirky.” The film works on the well worn and unobjectionable idea that people ought be accepted for who they are, rather than being told that they need to try and be normal. That’s a sentiment anybody can get behind, but like most generalized concepts, it has its limits. While the movie tries to paint its main character Mary as a misunderstood, sympathetic figure, there’s a pathological selfishness to her supposed quirkiness that strains even the most patient and accepting of people. The movie may see Mary as a victim of a society unwilling to engage with her, but the picture shows a person who goes out of her way to avoid engaging society. See the thing is, she’s not really quirky at all. She’s just irritating. And a stalker. Not the best combination.
And there lies the main problem of All About Steve, placing all of its eggs in one really annoying basket. Mary isn’t so much a person as a collection of annoying quirks, a virtual avatar of nonconformity that takes things way too far. Are we supposed to feel sorry for her when she gets fired for constructing an unsolvable crossword puzzle about her new obsession, Steve? At every turn the movie presents her as a romantic figure, following her dreams, when she’s really just being proactively stupid. When not falling all over itself to praise the brazen idiocy of its main character, the movie piles on the broad comedy, pushing physical injury above all else. It does so to such an extreme that it abandons all pretense of being set in a world of reasonable people, who would probably be able to see a big gaping hole in the middle of a field and avoid falling into it.
The main culprit here is star Sandra Bullock, who also produced the film. It might just be that she’s been stuck playing so many sensible, functional women that she’s had to go in the opposite direction. But her understanding of quirk manifests itself as just a series of ridiculous gestures: wildly flagellating arms, excited jumping, an affected lisp and red boots mark up the façade of difference with enough condescension to bury whatever sincerity was in it. Bullock is backed up by worthy talents in Thomas Haden Church, Ken Jeong and Bradley Cooper, but nothing they do can make up for the vortex of irritation that Bullock produces.
All About Steve fails because it doesn’t really understand its subject. There are certainly out there who have indeed been marginalized for being different, for having a different outlook, or maybe for being too smart and knowledgeable for their own good. Mary represents none of these people. Mary is an insult to these people, a grating caricature of nonconformity that makes conformity seem like the only reasonable option.
My Rating:
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