thoughts on The Spectacular Now

Miles Teller (who you may remember from the relatively recent Footloose remake) stars as Sutter, a high school senior who has recently broken up with (been dumped by?) his girlfriend, Cassidy (Brie Larson, from The United States of Tara and 21 Jump Street).  In voiceover early in the film, he says something like, "I don't want to say that we were the life of every party...but we were pretty much the life of every party."  He meets Aimee (Shailene Woodley) when he literally passes out on her lawn one night after a party; she finds him the next morning when she heads out to leave on her (technically her mom's) paper route.  He offers to help her out, and the two of them begin a friendship that fairly quickly develops into a romance.

I thought the film's performances were pretty solid across the board.  Teller is charming as Sutter, a basically nice guy who isn't doing great in Math, who sneaks drinks from a flask pretty much constantly, and who believes his mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) kicked his father (Kyle Chandler) out years ago.  Woodley is insecure and nice as Aimee.  However, in terms of plot, I really had no idea where the movie was going, or where I was supposed to want it to go.  Sutter and Aimee make an okay couple, I suppose.  On the one hand, he drinks too much, and she starts drinking quite a bit when she's around him.  On the other hand, through dating him, she gains the confidence to stand up to her mom (who we never meet), who Aimee thinks won't let her leave to go to college. 

There is also the issue that since the movie is told from Sutter's perspective, we don't really know that much about Aimee.  She reveals at one point that her father, an addict, is dead.  She seems smart and like kind of a loner, though we see one friend that she occasionally talks to.  She gets along fine when Sutter takes her to a party, though, so it seems mainly that she lacks confidence, not like everyone sees her as some huge dork or anything.  When it comes down to it, we don't know enough about Sutter, either; he's supposedly popular, and he seems to get invited to more stuff than Aimee, but it seems to be mostly because he's a partier and somewhat charming.  He doesn't seem to be popular for any particular reason; the popular kids at my high school were good at things and really involved in the school, and that doesn't seem to be the case with him.  So...it's a love story between two kind of blah characters who don't really do much except hang out together and drink, and you're not really sure whether you want them to stay together or not.  In other words...it's hard to care that much about this movie.