The Art Of Getting By
It’s easy to see what writer-director Gavin Wiesen was going for when he concocted The Art of Getting By. Cut from the mould of a thousand coming-of-age dramas, the last few years are littered with attempts at putting inventive spins on the well-worn “popular girl meets troubled guy” formula, and it’s a field that’s as littered with failure as it is with triumph. While the sin that most of the weaker efforts are guilty of is a simple lack of invention, something far worse is going on here. Supplementing its susceptibility to genre cliches with a catastrophically unlikeable lead character, a wince-inducingly asinine script and a frankly farcical closing third, The Art of Getting By is notable for the military precision with which it wastes its talented cast, and might well be the poorest film you see this year.
The story centres around George (Freddy Highmore), a high school student with a talent for drawing and a preoccupation with death. From the very beginning of his opening monologue, the extent to which he is obsessed with his own mortality never once threatens to come off as believable or proportional. As he opines to his teachers about how homework is insignificant in comparison to his own looming demise, it’s difficult to suss out exactly how Wiesen wanted us to interpret this. It’s a notion too ludicrous to be sympathised with, and too obnoxiously delivered to be perceived as endearing.
The Art of Getting By spends most of its time focusing on the relationship developing between George and Sally (Emma Roberts), and although there is a measure of on-screen chemistry between the pair, it’s difficult to come to an informed conclusion about the quality of their performances here when the material they are working with is so fundamentally defective. Intensely dialogue-driven, the conversations they have at best make desparate swipes at profundity, and at worst are simply unforgivably inauthentic. These are conversations no real human would have, so to shoehorn them into something that proclaims itself to be a normal human story is a textbook example of faulty logic, not to mention shoddy, amateurish writing.
As the film shuffles towards its conclusion, George’s cavalier attitude to his assignments predictably catches up with him, and he’s left with three weeks to complete a year’s worth of homework. As George’s family and teachers (a supporting cast littered with stock characters that amount to little more than one-dimensional placekeepers) stress the urgency of the matter at hand, it’s difficult to imagine how the situation he finds himself in can come as a shock to anyone. Needless to say, the moral of the story isn’t that actions have consequences. In fact, it’s difficult to discern if there really is a moral at all. In The Art of Getting By, what we’re faced with are the trials and tribulations of a character we are never encouraged to care about. In fact, by the time George has pouted, sulked and moaned his way to the film’s final third, we’re actively rooting against him.
As the plot resolves itself with inevitably empty-headed whimsy, what we’ve seen here is a film not merely content to tick the boxes of its genre and wallow in its own mediocrity. Instead, it shoots for the stars: unsympathetic characters, an offensively weak script and a wholly unmerited sense of smug self-satisfaction make The Art of Getting By an altogether more baffling proposition. This is a film whose cast list could have been a who’s who of the world’s greatest, and even they could not have wrenched an ounce of feeling out of this self-consciously angsty, aggressively pointless and vapidly existential monstrosity.
