AJ O'Leary

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Movie Review: “High Fidelity” (2000)

Tone-deaf cult classic about 'the ones that got away' is a record worth skipping

When you're a movie lover, truly great films can become legends in your mind. You might randomly think of them from time to time, unattached from whatever setting you happen to be in; maybe you'll work them into conversations with your friends. Bonus points if something 'great' in your mind isn't a consensus pick and you get to go against the grain like a precocious kid going on endlessly about their favorite types of trains.

The worst movies can become legends for all the wrong reasons; their memory lingers in the mind like a pesky cold sore, a counterweight to all the films so great they make you remember why you fell in love with movies in the first place. Extra points deducted if it's a film everyone else loves. People don't usually judge other people too harshly for loving things that aren't obviously horrible for the world, but if you hate something everyone else loves, you might as well be murdering the holiday season.

High Fidelity falls into the second category for me.

Adapted from a Nick Hornby (About a Boy, Fever Pitch) novel by character piece director Stephen Frears, High Fidelity is, allegedly, a paean to record stores and those who frequent them. John Cusack, in a sort of last-gasp role recalling the boombox-thrusting 80s romcoms that made him famous, plays Rob Gordon, a man who manages a Chicago record store that doesn't seem to be in the business of actually selling records to anyone. Instead, he and his pals Barry and Dick (Jack Black and Todd Louiso, respectively), take turns insulting customers over their lack of taste with the energy of the Comic Book Guy until they get frustrated and leave.

Throughout the film, Rob looks directly at the camera, breaking the fourth wall every five seconds to tell his story to us; one where he, the Nice Guy, is constantly finishing last because women are all evil she-demons too distracted by their pursuit of (vanity/money/some guy who would totally be into CrossFit if this movie came out in 2021) to appreciate the Nice Guy who loves music and crafting manifestos about why he's intellectually superior to the drooling masses genetically incapable of appreciating his favorite music. The many loves of Rob Gordon - Laura (Iben Hjejle), Charlie (played by a young, pre-Zorro Catherine Zeta-Jones), and Marie (Lisa Bonet) among them - are written about as shallow as his stated reasons for purportedly being lovable, something I would call "lazy character development indicative of writers treating female characters as afterthoughts like they always do" but is probably known as "the classical folly of an unreliable narrator" or whatever by the ~90% of critics and random viewers who would think I'm full of it if they read this review.

That's... about it. The film just goes on like this for the longest two hours of my film-watching life, alternating between glimpses into Rob's contemporary sad life and high/lowlights from his "Top 5" relationships and breakups. There's never any major buildup; no moments worth caring about like, well, the boombox from Say Anything. No major life lessons are learned. There is no major payoff, just Rob vaguely deciding he's figured out how to make Laura happy, something intended for us to perceive as a happy moment even though everything Rob has done up to this point would indicate that he's a pitiable, toxic man-child incapable of making or acting on positive realizations about anything.

Films with unlikable male leads aren't anything new. I even love several of them! I don't automatically dislike a film for making a jerk its main character. The thing is, though, that the good films with a Rob Gordon-type in them (at least at the start) have a point and an actual resolution of some kind. Everyone has known a Neal Page at some point in their lives, and Planes, Trains & Automobiles goes to great lengths to show that he's pretentious and kind of a tool. Over its 90 minute runtime, however, his shell cracks and he's shown to be a compassionate family man deep down with the capacity to show love towards those less fortunate than him. Same goes for Groundhog Day's Phil Connors, a surly jerk who realizes following time spent in a purgatorial time loop that the fine folks of Punxsutawney are people, too, and that he should stop being so lame.

We don't get that with Rob. We get a guy who, if anything, doubles down on his antipathy towards women and those 'less' than him until he's flashing Kubrick stares at the camera and acting as if he's one grievance away from going full Joker.

I hated High Fidelity. It goes nowhere, says nothing, and introduces me to a man worth ignoring and women who deserve better than to be trapped in the layer of Hell this film's version of Chicago operates in. It's nostalgic for a time that hadn't even gone out of style yet in 2000 (record stores did not truly die off until the Great Recession, no matter how many revisionist "Remember the good old days?!?" screeds claim otherwise) and insults the viewer by implying that we've all got a piece of Rob Gordon within us and still will into our 30s. No thanks!

Overall Score: 1 / 5

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