'Shopgirl'

By Norman Wilner, Zap2It.com | July 12, 2008

Claire Danes and Steve Martin in 'The Shopgirl'

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Steve Martin's "Shopgirl" started out as a slender work of fiction about a young woman who works behind the glove counter of a department store, and the two men in her life. And now Martin has adapted it for the screen.

It's nicely cast, with Claire Danes as the young woman, Mirabelle, and Martin and Jason Schwarzman in smaller roles as, respectively, the wealthy and elegant Ray Porter, who becomes Mirabelle's lover and benefactor, and the unreconstructed slacker Jeremy, who lingers around the periphery of Mirabelle's life after blowing his big chance with her.

The film is photographed by Peter Suschitzky so that every one of its glossy Los Angeles locations shimmers with boutique elegance, and the sets are perfectly decorated. Even the clothes are perfectly tailored to the actors.

But there's a coldness to it all that shouldn't be there. A sort of underlying emptiness to everything that mutes the drama. It's as if Martin couldn't find a way to expand his spare prose to fill the demands of cinematic narrative, or didn't care to. And Anand Tucker's direction is too respectful of the material to push it any further than Martin will let it go.

There are moments when "Shopgirl" captures the novella's tender, almost painfully intimate tone - a shot of Mirabelle, laid out on Ray Porter's bed like a figure from a Francis Bacon painting; a moment in Ray Porter's Seattle apartment that lets us glimpse the total isolation he's built around himself -- but they just hang there, unsupported. It's almost as though we're watching the movie become a coffee-table book of itself.

Listen to the audio version instead; it's read by Martin himself, and goes straight to the heart of what the movie misses.

Touchstone's enhanced-widescreen DVD offers an audio commentary, but it's the wrong commentator: Instead of Martin, who might have been able to discuss the difficulties of dragging his delicate story from one medium into another, we get director Tucker, who seems like a very nice fellow but clearly wasn't the prime mover behind this project.

Martin is more prominently featured on the 25-minute making-of, along with Danes, Tucker, and producer Ashok Armritraj; he also turns up in one of the two deleted scenes that make up the rest of the special-features section.

STUDIO: Touchstone Home Entertainment
RELEASE DATE:April 25, 2006
RATING: R
PRICE: $29.95
TIME: 106 minutes
DVD EXTRAS: French and Spanish audio dubs; French and Spanish subtitles; audio commentary; deleted scenes; production featurette.
INTERNET SITE: video.com/shopgirl