Double White Tank Top Movie Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World versus The Law

Last week, I was surprised to find considerable overlap between Edgar Wright’s recent Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Jules Dassin’s 1959 film The Law (which, sadly, was not rereleased under its original English title Where the Hot Wind Blows!).

The premise of Scott Pilgrim is well known to fans of comic books: Scott (Michael Cera, trying to be slightly less lovable than usual), after unceremoniously dumping his enthusiastic teenage girlfriend Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), must defeat, in the full, arcade-game sense of the word, the seven exes of his new beau Ramona Flowers (May Elizabeth Winstead). As Scott plows through evil ex after evil ex, I got the feeling he enjoys the fight more than Ramona herself, with whom he exchanges flat, if witty, dialogue.

In The Law, Gina Lollobrigida stars as Mariette (in a role I imagine Sophia Loren would have filled were she not busy acting and sleeping with Cary Grant in Hollywood at the time). Lollobrigida is matched with the bizarrely affectless Enrico Tosso (Marcello Mastroianni), an agronomist who made his money by breeding an amphibious sheep-goat. Or something.

Read the full review after the jump.

Also providing no chemistry with Mariette is the small-time hustler Matteo Brigante (Yves Montand), the kind of guy who sneers while drinking straight vermouth. Money is the only thing that gets Mariette’s heart pumping — her bodice heaves when she spots the wallet of a fat Swiss tourist; and, when she’s secured his pile of bills, she hums “The Wedding March.”

While Scott Pilgrim’s chilly Toronto and The Law’s sweaty Porto Manacore are divergent temperature-wise, they are both self-contained worlds. Toronto is characterized by gently falling snow, loud underground music and elaborately choreographed fistfights, punctuated with textual graphics. After one Kapow!, Knives Chau has the blue highlights punched out of her hair.

Despite some modern contrivances, Porto Manacore seems to have rolled backward into inescapable feudalism: people get on the bus but we never see them leave. The film’s title refers to “The Law,” which has to be the least fun drinking game ever invented. One person is selected by chance to be the Boss, who gets to drink all he wants from a tankard of wine and only dole out cups to other players after he has insulted them.

In both films, the secondary characters have more juice than the primaries.The subplot of illicit love between Donna Lucrezia (Melina Mercouri) and Francesco (Raf Mattioli) has a lot more heat than the central Lollobrigida-Mastroianni misfire. Don Cesare (a Hemingway-esque Pierre Brasseur) is both a feudal lord and an artist, sculpting in the spare time he has between power plays. He is the only admirable man in Porto Manacore — with his white hair and beard he blends in with the marble busts of Grecian heroes that line his studio.

In Scott Pilgrim, Kieran Culkin steals every scene he’s in as Wallace Wells, Scott’s gay roommate, full of the ineluctable charm Mr. Pilgrim lacks. Jason Schwartzman taps into his deep reservoir of assholishness as Gideon, Ramona’s final ex (I haven’t seen him so amusingly full of it since Roman Coppola’s CQ). And I wish there were more of Anna Kendrick as Scott’s older sister (or, more accurately, I wish Ms. Kendrick were my older sister).

It’s also fun to compare the verging-on-overwrought dialogue in The Law with the deadpan slacker-speak in Scott Pilgrim. One sweet Italian says to his lover as she departs, “I’ll see you tomorrow — it will be a long day,” which is really kind of poignant. Scott ends a relationship with the somewhat less touching, “Well, bye and stuff.”

I’m disappointed that neither film led its protagonist to the ideal mate (and I’ll admit to being wrong in my predictions of how both films would end).

Mariette gets her boring agronomist, which seems little consolation for a character with so much vigor. I’d hate to spoil anything for someone who hasn’t seen Scott Pilgrim yet but I say Scott doesn’t take his best option (hint: she’s the one who gets the finest background music of the whole film: Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl”).

I would recommend pairing other works by these talented directors — try the cops and robbers hijinks of Wright’s Hot Fuzz and Dassin’s Rififi. 

Follow Kirk Michael biweekly on CAB, or on his own blog, White Tank Top, which offers more film reviews and other well-crafted cultural criticism.