my favorite movie of 2001:

Ghost World

(Thora Birch, Steve Buscemi, Scarlett Johansson, Illeana Douglas. Directed by Terry Zwigoff.)

You can stream Ghost World on Tubi (free with ads), Kanopy, or these sites.

Check out my in-depth notes on this movie here (with spoilers).

Ghost World is based on a comic book, and much of the movie is brightly colored and cartoonish on the surface. Yet by the time it’s over, I end up caring about these characters on a level I’ve rarely experienced with seemingly more realistic movies. My biggest complaint about this movie is that there isn’t a sequel — and it leaves you just aching for one!

To say that Ghost World is my favorite movie of the 21st century would be an understatement. For me, nothing else comes close. Ebert also felt strongly about it:

I wanted to hug this movie. It takes such a risky journey and never steps wrong. It creates specific, original, believable, lovable characters, and meanders with them through their inconsolable days, never losing its sense of humor.

Wikipedia says Ghost World had “minimal” “commercial success” at first, but has turned into “a cult film.” How has this off-beat indie movie, by a director whose previous movies were all documentaries, endured for 20 years? One thing is: Ghost World feels as relevant as ever because of the way it ties into “cancel culture.” And the movie repeatedly passes the “Bechdel test,” with several scenes where various different women talk to each other about stuff other than men.

An article from 2021, looking back on Ghost World 20 years later, says once Thora Birch read the screenplay, she was “desperate to play Enid,” the protagonist:

What was it about that character? “Basically she had every opinion that I had at the time!” laughs Birch. “At that phase of my life I was just reaching adulthood and not ready for it and not feeling like I ever would be, and so a lot of her lines and the outlook on life were things I really felt, but at that time, I didn’t feel Thora Birch could go around expressing.”

But Terry Zwigoff (the director) and Daniel Clowes (the cartoonist, who wrote the screenplay with Zwigoff) wanted Birch to play Enid’s friend Rebecca, a supporting role which ended up going to an obscure actress named Scarlett Johansson:

“They didn’t really see me as an Enid,” says Birch. “But I loved the part so much that I was like, ‘I’m gonna go to lunch with these guys, I’m gonna cut my hair, I’m gonna dye it, and put on these fake glasses and show ’em.’ And it worked.” …

There must have been something seductive about negotiating the world as Enid? “Yeah, it’s her lack of filter,” says Birch. … “She calls out something that she thinks is lame. She says what she feels. And there is something liberating and freeing about that but it also can cause a lot of damage.” …

The 2021 article brings up the covid-19 pandemic:

Ghost World may have a special resonance right now. It is, after all, a film about loneliness. … [Birch] says the movie’s jaundiced outlook will always attract like-minded souls. “Introspection is really gripping a lot of people. So I think that comes into play for somebody watching Ghost World now — we’re all kind of forced to be closed off from others. But also: discontentment is not going out of fashion, you know?”

Ghost World is hard to categorize. Is it a “romantic comedy”? That might be literally true, but that trite label feels inadequate to describe a movie that doesn’t fall back on predictable plot formulas or cookie-cutter characters.

A movie that starts out as a quirky comedy about jaded teens drifting through a soulless, hyper-commercialized world pivots to a moodier, more atmospheric tone in the middle. After Enid buys an old blues record from Steve Buscemi’s character, Seymour, at his weekly garage sale, we watch her at home entering a contemplative, possibly trance-like state as she listens to one song on the record over and over (“Devil Got My Woman” by Skip James, singing and playing acoustic guitar with no accompaniment). The movie has briefly stopped being a comedy, and this scene will make it easier for us to accept even more dramatic tonal shifts later on.

When Enid goes back to the garage sale, she raves about the song she had on repeat and eagerly asks Seymour: “Do you have any other records like that?”

Seymour, who’s usually meek and self-effacing, has a rare moment of confidence when he responds knowingly: “There are no other records like that.”

Well … there are no other movies like Ghost World.

See this post for more of my thoughts on Ghost World.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.