Shopgirl: Steve Martin

The other night my brother and I were driving from Barrie to Toronto at night. There’s a point in the journey, when the city is still miles and miles away, when the road rises and a blanket of lights stretches out across the horizon, serving as a reminder of how enormous Toronto really is.

We got talking about the city, and how it’s really a collection of lives. Millions of human beings -- living, breathing, working, loving. And how each of them is connected, in some way, to others around them, forming tiny little networks and communities, pockets of friendship and community that interconnect and stretch into a giant web that make this city, which sometimes seems so cold, into a beautiful, livable place.

Shopgirl, based on a novella by Steve Martin, explores one lonely girl’s life in Los Angeles, and how she, almost by accident, builds her own little community.
I read the book first. It, like the movie, provided a glimpse into the life of Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes), a pretty ordinary young woman who lives in the big city, works at Saks Fifth Avenue, and every once in a while draws a picture, in a small way living out the artistic ambitions that brought her to the city in the first place.

She’s lonely, but her issues go deeper than that– touching on depression. She wants to change her life but she doesn’t really know how to go about it, and is just sort of surviving.

“She keeps working to make connections, but the pile of near-misses is starting to overwhelm her,” says Steve Martin, who serves as narrator as well as one of the leading characters in the film.

By accident, two people come into Mirabelle’s life simultaneously, and they couldn’t be more different from each other, right down to the way they meet and their opening lines.

Jeremy, played by Jason Schwartzman, is a sloppy 20-something who has a job stenciling logos on amplifiers. Mirabelle meets him in a Laundromat.
“Hey. I mean hello. Hi,” Jeremy says, by way of introduction. He later tells her: “I’m an okay guy by the way,” and you intrinsically believe this is true, though there isn’t much substance to him beyond the fact that he is an “okay guy.”

Ray Porter, on the other hand, played by Martin, is a distinguished, wealthy, 50-something millionaire. He meets Mirabelle at the Saks glove counter where she works, purchasing a $145 pair of gloves. Disarming, yet giving little away, he leaves an impression on the wary Mirabelle. Later he gives her the gloves with a note that reads: “ I would like to have dinner with you.”

Mirabelle, glowing a little from the excitement of it all, dates both for a while. But inevitably, despite his assurances that he’s “not looking for anything permanent,” she falls in love with Ray and mostly forgets about Jeremy, who goes off to pursue a dream, somehow inspired by Mirabelle to do so.

Ray sweeps her away with well-practiced charm, gifts and maturity that give her a sense of comfort. But in reality, she’s less secure with Ray than she was without him, because his love is fleeting and superficial and he’s searching for something that Mirabelle can’t provide, and that maybe no woman can provide – perfection.

Things between then go okay for a while, but there’s a sense that this can’t last. And then the moment comes when it all has to fall apart.
Ray is planning a trip to New York, and he tells Mirabelle – cruelly though he doesn’t realize it -- that he’s thinking of buying a place, maybe a three-bedroom ‘in case he meets someone and wants to settle down.’

Those careless words break Mirabelle’s heart, but give her the kick she needed to walk away.
“I can hurt now or I can hurt later,” she says, before saying goodbye.

Somehow, Ray is not ready to love Mirabelle and never will be, and despite his early warnings to her, his spiel about “ keeping our options open,” and his attempts to make it clear they weren’t really together, her true feelings took over and she fell in love with him.

In the meantime, Jeremy has moved towards becoming the man Mirabelle needs, and when he comes back into her life, she sees that.

Ray has shown Mirabelle what she needs -- through what he doesn’t possess -- and Jeremy, through the process of life, has developed some of those characteristics and become someone she can love.

And when their paths cross it’s the right time and the right place, and something beautiful happens.

“I’ll protect you,” Jeremy says, now grown up and successful. And his words are just what Mirabelle needs to hear.

“What he offers is tender and true,” the narrator says.

Isn’t that what we all need?