Voids
Oscar Grubman (Aaron Stanford) heads home from prep school for
Thanksgiving full of anticipation. As he rides the train with
his classmate Charlie (Robert Iler), they lay out typical
15-year-old plans -- Oscar has a particular girl in mind,
someone, he says, he's "known for a while." He won't say her
name, but drops that she'll be at the Upper East Side party
hosted by his father, Stanley (John Ritter), a Columbia Asian
history professor. As it turns out, she has good reason to be
there: she's the co-host, dad's wife, Eve (Sigourney Weaver).
The crush is wholly understandable. Eve is wonderful in every
way, a medical researcher who specializes in the workings of the
(so metaphorical) heart. Witty, warm, and beautiful, she even
moves in poetic slow motion as Oscar gazes on her from across
the room, removing her red cashmere scarf as if it's a heavenly
vestment. She is also, to Oscar's keen eye, slightly melancholy,
unfulfilled in some vague way. Her best friend Diane (wonderful,
sharp Bebe Neuwirth) confirms Oscar's feeling when she observes
that Eve has a "void, something missing."
Determined to prove he's the one to fill that void, Oscar is at
first frustrated by serial distractions (Eve has other people to
talk to, Stanley sets him up with a colleague's daughter),
until, at evening's end, he takes himself to a bar to drown his
sorrow. The bartender serves him and a lovely young woman hits
on him. In another movie, we'd probably be deep inside Oscar's
fantasy-world here, but that's not quite the case in
Tadpole. As written by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller
and directed by Gary Winick (who made the under-seen The Tic
Code), this look at one teen's ostensibly urgent desires
takes a mostly blithe approach. The boy's perspective shapes his
world, and the movie never asks that he -- or you -- question
that perspective.
When Oscar, precocious and privileged, sees his life collapsing
around his ears, the film takes his point of view, with
appropriate and convenient embellishments. When it's convenient
to abandon that point of view -- to reinforce it -- the movie
does that too. And when it looks as though Oscar's perspective
might possibly need adjusting -- like maybe he's not quite the
answer to dissatisfied 40ish women's sexual and emotional
longings -- well, the movie doesn't allow for that possibility
at all. Oscar is that answer, because the women in the movie
only exist to make him seem so.
This begins when, on his self-pitying way home from the bar, he
runs into Diane, who takes him home to sober up. A chiropractor,
she has a table in her apartment. She also happens to have
borrowed Eve's red scarf, the one that so paused Oscar's heart
earlier that evening. As he rests on the table, his face hanging
down through the head-hole, he glimpses the scarf; it appears
from his point of view, frame, deliriously alluring. His back
only partly unknotted, Oscar lurches to his feet, leans heavily
against Diane, and before you know it, they're in bed.
Oscar is unsurprisingly mortified in the morning: he has one of
those standard roll-over-in-bed-and-spot-your-lover's-face
moments, his eyes pop open, and he essays an escape, only to run
into "Phil, the boyfriend" in her kitchen. Double entendres
linking sex to chiropractics ensue. Oscar swears Diane to
secrecy, believing news of the tryst will ruin his chances with
Eve. The rest of the film follows his efforts to contain Diane's
relatively lackadaisical attitude and flirt with Eve. Stanley
remains mostly on the sidelines, until a father-son
heart-to-heart reveals to them both that perhaps they need to
talk more.
In assuming Oscar's perspective, the film makes out like
everyone is as smitten with him as he is, admiring his perfect
French (his unseen mother is French, living in France,
"exotic"), his charming gravity, his self-righteousness, and his
predilection for Voltaire, whom he quotes often and the film
quotes even more often, in preciously ironic inter-titles, as
in, "Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do," or
again, "Reason consists of always seeing things as they are."
Diane introduces him round to her girlfriends as a delightful
confection, unusually passionate, suitably deferential, and,
apparently, a good lay. Oscar sits among them during a brunch,
holding forth on some deep philosophical point, or at least a
point that seems deep to a 15-year-old. The women cluck and coo;
one gives him her number.
Just why women who appear to be accomplished and independent
might find this self-doting child so enchanting is a question
the film can't ask, because it's a question that does not occur
to Oscar. And such moments, however self-conscious, only
underline its too-cuteness, as do various set-pieces (cleverly
shot, intimate and also elusive, on digital video by Hubert
Taczanowski): Oscar and Eve discuss poetry and passion in her
lab, with repeated references to "the heart"; the four
principals do an upscale restaurant dinner, Diane drinking to
excess and Oscar so desperate to impress Eve that he's glued on
sideburns, having heard that she liked Elvis when she was
younger -- when she kisses him near the bathroom, she returns to
the table with a sideburn stuck to her face. Of course, the
truth comes out, voices are raised, and Oscar, so sincere and so
persistent, almost convinces Eve that he might fill her "void."
While Oscar's point of view can encompass poignant and
ridiculous moments, the film retreats from the emotional edge
set by the film to which it has been most often compared, The
Graduate. In fact, Tadpole doesn't leave the
comparison to chance: angry at her friend for sleeping with her
Eve does learn of the scandalous liaison, Diane tries to mollify
her, observing, "It's all very The Graduate." Eve snarks
back, "Except Oscar hasn't graduated." Yet, despite her
protestations, Eve leaves this conversation more confused about
her own feelings concerning her stepson.
This scene stands out (with a couple of others), with action
that Oscar can't know or witness, but might well imagine.
Tadpole initially poses provocative questions about
relationships or responsibilities: is Oscar "an adult, or close
enough," as Diane says? Are middle-aged women so needy that a
15-year-old looks good? Is Stanley as clueless as he seems? But
rather than letting them hang, disturbingly, it falls back on an
attitude more smug than challenging. Worst of all, it closes
with Oscar back on the train to school, reconciled with a future
involving girls "his own age." If this is the primary lesson
he's learned, it only highlights how shallow he's been all
along. And when the movie closes on this cozy image, accompanied
by Bowie's "Changes," no less, it highlights just how shallow
it's been, as well.
— 25 July 2002
