The Art of Getting By’s protagonist George is told by his art teacher to create a piece of art that is “honest and fearless.” He then warns, “I can smell a rat.” Well, I can smell a rat. This film is neither honest nor fearless. It is painfully mediocre. Nothing about this film feels genuine, every moment rings hollow.
The acting is bland at best. Freddie Highmore as George is completely devoid of emotion. He fails to capture a single facial expression in the entire film. He stumbles through the movie with such carelessness that I am confused as to how any person could care one iota about what happens to his character. Almost none of the actors seem to care about anything that is happening in the film. The only hints of character development come from Blair Underwood as George’s principal and Rita Wilson as his mother, and they are barely in the movie.
The story is uninspiring. It is a derivative attempt to capture some form of existential angst. But, you would be better served by reading the Cliff Notes for the Stranger that watching this wretched thing. At best this is cereal box philosophy or perhaps a bad lounge cover of Alanis Morissette’s “You Ought To Know.”
The interactions between the characters were uninspiring. I did not believe for one moment that George loved Sally (Emma Roberts). Nor did I believe that Dustin (Michael Angarano) loved Sally or was even attracted to her. The interactions between parents and children even rang hollow. All of the seemingly upper middle class parents let their children wander NYC day and night, drink at bars, party at clubs, and live on their own and no one seems to care. They are utterly permissive but somehow not abusive. Which is fine, I suppose, if this was developed to some end, but it never was. The only hint is the strange and unmotivated decision by each child to reference her parents by their first name — of course this is done with no hint of sarcasm, why be bothered with that.
The dialogue was wholly unimaginative. Frankly, the characters could have been in college or 35 for that matter. It would not have mattered. At least their partying and gallivanting would have made more sense, not to mention their strange desires to live the life of pseudo scenesters. At times I wondered if someone sat with a Thesaurus and tried to force each line of dialogue to be slightly more pedantic than it needed to be (like what I did there).
To make matters worse writer director Gavin Wiesen chose to tell the story through short little unimaginative vignettes. No one scene lasts more than 3 minutes. As much as he wanted these short scenes to feel artistic or poetic, they instead seemed catered to an audience devoid of an attention span. It somehow captured what it must be like to be a cat distracted by every single shinny object. The choice to shoot the film in these little snip-its left no room for character development. The attempt to be artsy was a complete failure. The artistic image of NYC is better captured by dime store post cards with the attraction spelled out in neon. I occasionally wondered if Wiesen put a camera on his cats collar and let her roam around NYC, but then again that would have produced a better product.
If you want to have a slightly more genuine experience than this one, do the following. Head to your local college campus, find an undergraduate philosophy major who has just read Camus for the first time, buy her a drink, and ask her about whatever person she is currently interested in. I promise it will be a more worthwhile use of your time and money.
PARSI VERDICT: The art of mediocrity.