THE ART OF GETTING BY

Wow. I didn’t believe a single thing about this movie.

Not the characters, not the story and certainly not any of the navel-gaze-y and pretentious dialogue that drips out of the mouths of a bunch of self-absorbed teenagers who all sound like they’re 40. Nevermind that it lost me right in the first scene, supposedly set in a high-school trigonometry class, where writer-director Gavin Wiesen looks to have filled desks with an extras cast made up of what I can only assume are his will-work-for-free thirtysomething friends. I saw the “students” and thought, “Those are the oldest-looking 17 year olds I’ve ever seen.”

And the clichéd, non-believability just kept going from there.

Felling entirely like it was poorly cobbled together using spare parts from superior teen-angst movies before it, The Art of Getting By presents us with George (Freddie Highmore), a New York high schooler, who never does his homework, lives by a “what’s the point?” code and repeatedly expounds on his eye-roll-inducing philosophies any chance he can get. His too-cool-to-be-real principal (Blair Underwood) is at a loss, his beleaguered mother (Rita Wilson) doesn’t know how to get him motivated and, until he meets comely classmate Sally (Emma Roberts), George doesn’t really care much about anything at all.

Thing is, neither did I as an audience member.

So, by the time George starts to fall for Sally, and edgy artist Dustin (Michael Angarano, whose character was one of the only things I liked about the film) arrives on the scene to complicate matters, all I could do was look at my watch and wonder how much longer it would take for the cookie-cutter, unimaginative story to reach its inevitable, unsurprising conclusion.

The problems in The Art of Getting By all come down to its script, which is boring and flat and consistently puts unconvincing language into the mouths of people who would likely never say the words they’re speaking in any kind of remotely real world. At one point, over dinner at a posh restaurant no teens would ever visit, Sally says to George, “What were you like as a kid?”

And all I could think was, “What, YESTERDAY?”

All the teenagers address the adults – parents, teachers, whomever – by their first names (?!), and all the adults seem more than willing to put up with the whims of children. And don’t get me started on Sally’s mother (Elizabeth Reaser), who’s supposed to be this loose, boozy maneater and could have been fun but who, in the hands of known-for-playing-sensible-women Reaser, reads as fake, fake, fake and more fake.

Speaking of, a good chunk of the film takes place over winter – specifically, Christmas and New Year’s – so it was, in my opinion, just really lazy, sloppy filmmaking to: 1. stage scenes outdoors, 2. make no effort to hide the fact that the film was clearly shot in the summer (or maybe autumn, if I’m being generous) when all the trees are still lush and green, and 3. not bother to care if anyone notices!

Sadly, that seems to be underlying message of the film and, perhaps, all involved in its creation, as well. From the story to the performances to the set decoration, two words exhaled in one weary sigh seem to permeate everything:

"Who cares?”

Not me.