Metropolitan

That’s me, always late to the party—and not fashionably, either. Somehow I managed to completely miss seeing Whit Stillman’s charming little indie flick, Metropolitan, until last weekend, which should probably be added to the list of intellectual sins that includes the fact that I just read my first Philip Roth book last week. But even though it’s clear that the beleaguered revelers are putting on their coats and the host is cleaning up the Yuengling bottles, I’ll take a shot at the film that caused a minor culture-blog hiccup recently after Austin Kelly’s strained Slate article on the movie’s possible lack of conservative sentiment.

Essentially, Metropolitan is Swingers for the high-society East Coast set. A regular gang of aimless youngsters get dressed up and hang out at parties, talking incessantly about dating and relationships while riffing endlessly on how their lives seem to consist of little more than . . . getting dressed up and hanging out at parties. And where Swingers had a lackadaisical, causally vulgar West Coast swagger that reflected the boozy, bawdy lives of its protagonists, Metropolitan has a delicate, refined sense to it—a trim and proper sheen that’s equally a mirror of its characters. The roving clans of friends in each film even share a common reference point—Frank Sinatra—who informs the bluster of the Swingers crew just as he projects the tailored veneer of Metropolitan’s East Coasters: the Sally Foster Rat Pack.

As for the much disputed point about whether or not Metropolitan is a particularly conservative film, well, I’m only marginally convinced. Certainly, the finale, in which stupidity, selfishness, and crudeness are rejected in favor of some sweet-natured (if amusingly misdirected and awkward) play at upholding virtue has a conservative tinge. But if any movie in which the sweet, smart kid overcomes his minor personal pettiness to save the girl from a preening, musclebound jock is conservative, then lots of right-leaning folks are going to have to rethink the whole Hollywood-is-a-bastion-of-liberalism mentality.

If I were really stretching, I might try to argue that the protagonist’s arc from young, foolish “committed socialist” to sweet, virtue-protecting bourgeois hero makes a good case for calling the film conservative. After all, Tom Townsend is the kid who begins the film by arguing against deb parties, taxis, and even reading literature (he prefers to simply read artsy fartsy progressive criticism), and in the end, he rescues the innocent girl by taking a $120 taxi ride to Southampton, and even admits to having—gasp!—started to read novels. But that’s not so much a defense of conservatism as it is a way of showing how Townsend used second-hand social critiques as a defense mechanism to justify why he wasn’t partying it up on the East side deb circuit. At best it’s a light criticism of liberal theory, but the film seems far too clever and sweet to be reduced to an argument about its politics. Everyone who says the film has a smattering of conservative values is right; but that doesn’t mean it’s a conservative movie—in the way that, for example, The Constant Gardener or Good Night, and Good Luck are liberal movies—nor are its virtuous leanings what make it particularly memorable.

No, conservatives shouldn’t celebrate Metropolitan primarily for its paeans to virtue and bourgeoisie mores, they should celebrate it because it’s a very fine, very smart film. The delicately portrayed characters, the disarmingly literate dialog, the underhanded, Woody Allen-esque way it delivers its punchlines by cutting away, letting the humor arrive in aftershocks—Ross Douthat may find it “rough around the edges,” but I think it’s delightful. Stillman gives the proceedings an airy, light touch, that allows the characters to reveal their inherent silliness without losing their nobility, and generally finds all sorts of ways to recycle boy-from-across-the-tracks tropes into something new.

So sure, this is a movie with a bit of a conservative slant, and Austin’s contrived Slate piece is a rather lame attempt to justify how he, one of those open-minded liberal who surely must be annoyed by all things conservative, could like a movie that finds solace in tradition and virtue. But to call it a “conservative movie” is too much. It’s simply a very good movie, and conservatives should defend it as such.