Modern Immaturity

One of this year’s best movies, largely forgotten in all the din of summer action extravaganzas and gross-out comedies, was “High Fidelity,” which put the spotlight on a fascinating character. Rob Gordon, superbly played by John Cusack, was a pop music maniac, well into his 30s but still behaving like an overgrown, hyperactive adolescent.

While the details were fresh, the figure of the child-man has long been a favorite of American writers. But not many movies have looked at the character with the affectionate yet critical eye that “High Fidelity” brought to the exploits of this stubborn slacker.

Now Rob Gordon is about to be joined by a pack of loser-heroes desperate to postpone adulthood. Several current or upcoming movies take a thoughtful look at the same Peter Pan syndrome in a culture that seems more attuned to adolescence than growing up.

* “Chuck & Buck,” which opened recently, centers on a man of 27 who still sucks lollipops and hopes to reignite the sexual adventures he enjoyed with his boyhood pal when they were on the edge of puberty.

* “The Tao of Steve,” which opened last week, tells the story of Dex, a kindergarten teacher in Santa Fe, who debates Eastern philosophy with a gang of Frisbee golf-playing buddies and engages in hit-and-run affairs with the local lasses. Donal Logue won an acting award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for his expert portrayal of the overweight Lothario reluctant to grow up.

* In “Autumn in New York,” which opens Friday, Richard Gere plays a more upscale version of the irresponsible womanizer. He’s a celebrated New York chef who revels in his sexual conquests and in his determination to live an unfettered, hedonistic existence. He’s pushing 50 and has no intention of settling down; he abandoned a daughter years before, and he courts a woman half his age, played by Winona Ryder.

* A small indie film called “30 Days,” opening in September, follows a group of four friends who are shaken by the impending marriage of one in their group. The lead character, played by Ben Shenkman, is aimless in his job and relationships; he works in his parents’ liquor store, fools around with a lot of women and seems terrified of commitment

Later in the fall another Sundance prizewinner, “You Can Count on Me,” examines an adult brother and sister who are polar opposites. The sister (Laura Linney) is a single mother who works in a bank and tries to lead a neat, orderly life. Her brother (Mark Ruffalo) is a hard-drinking drifter who runs away from a pregnant girlfriend and always seems ready to light out for the territory when the going gets rough.

Is it sheer accident that several new American movies scrutinize the carefree, irresponsible male, or do these films provide a window into current cultural ferment? The “Greatest Generation” that endured the Depression and fought World War II believed--perhaps by necessity--in accelerating the journey to adulthood. But in recent decades the maturation process has often been put on indefinite hold. Without a lot of external pressures, men strive to remain forever young.

Although the new films reflect these social changes, they also tell us something about the Hollywood personalities who created the movies, those who have the luxury to live a less structured life than men working in office cubicles, factories or outlet malls.

Aaron Harnick, the writer-director of “30 Days,” is also an actor who co-starred with Edie Falco earlier this year in “Judy Berlin.” He’s the son of actress Barbara Barrie, who has significant roles in both “Judy Berlin” and “30 Days,” so he has spent most of his life in or around show business. He admits that for someone with his background, living in a state of perpetual adolescence is an occupational hazard.

“There is a narcissism that you have to have to be an actor,” Harnick says. “That could definitely stall your growth. I look at my friends on Wall Street, who live a very different life, and I’m kind of envious of their structure.”

The characters in most of these movies are slackers of one sort or another, and part of their appeal is that they thumb their noses at the values of today’s dot-com entrepreneurs and Wall Street bully boys. These dropouts and drifters haven’t embraced the gospel of greed that sees many college graduates working 80-hour weeks in pursuit of their first million. Dex in “The Tao of Steve” and Rob in “High Fidelity” may be fantasy figures to all the overworked guys in the audience who secretly yearn to flout the capitalist credo.

Lack of Ambition Has a Certain Charm

Yet these movies are not simple glorifications of the overgrown adolescent. While lack of ambition has a certain charm, these guys’ mortal fear of romantic commitment is not quite so endearing. Another important impulse behind these films is to criticize male mistreatment of women, and it’s surely no accident that two of the movies, “The Tao of Steve” and “Autumn in New York,” come from female directors.

Joan Chen’s film “Autumn in New York” is the more conventional of the two movies, a tear-jerker about a man losing the love of his life to an incurable disease. The film’s most intriguing element is the characterization of the defiantly immature protagonist, Gere’s Will Keane, who has clung to his adolescence for decades.

“He never grew up,” Chen says. “He never caught up with his age. Richard himself had his first child at age 50, so I think he could relate to the character.”

Chen, 39, feels that baby boomers are especially prone to prolong adolescence. “In casting sessions for the movie,” she says, “I met a lot of twentysomethings, and I was surprised at how many of them were married. My generation is the one that has really delayed adulthood.”

After growing up in China, Chen also sees this search for eternal youth as peculiarly American. “In this culture,” she says, “people are such pleasure-seekers. Anything painful is to be avoided. In my culture pain is a more accepted part of life.”

“The Tao of Steve,” a more original movie romance, began to take shape when director Jenniphr Goodman moved with her husband from New York to Santa Fe and decided to live with her husband’s college buddy, Duncan North. Goodman was fascinated by North’s impressive roster of female conquests, considering that he did not fit the model of either physical or financial perfection that our society holds up to men on the make.

“Duncan and I were both underemployed, and we spent a lot of time talking about his relationship with women and with God,” says Goodman, who co-wrote the screenplay with North and her sister, Greer, who also plays the female lead. “That permitted me a peek into the male psyche that I wouldn’t normally have had. I enjoyed my friendship with Duncan, but dating him might be maddening, since he admits that he stopped maturing in the eighth grade.”

The movie offered Goodman an opportunity to scrutinize the kind of footloose, seductive man who had bedeviled her all her life. “My father is a remarkable man in many ways,” Goodman says, “but he’s still in a state of protracted adolescence. That’s less true of my husband, but even with him, I had to convince him after we had our first baby that it might not be the best idea for him to continue playing poker with his male friends two nights a week. I think it’s always been true that men have had tendencies toward irresponsibility.

“Is it because men don’t raise children and therefore can continue to be children? But men have more freedom today than they did in 1940 or 1950. It’s easier to indulge in an extended adolescence.”

The charm of “The Tao of Steve” is that it allows us to see both the allure and the inadequacy of the perennially childlike male. “Chuck & Buck” presents an even more extreme, even frightening vision of a man who remains fixated on the fantasies of his boyhood, and yet the filmmakers have a sneaking sympathy for his point of view. When the stunted Buck (Mike White) confronts his childhood pal Chuck (Chris Weitz) and tells him that his whole adult life has been meaningless, there is a part of Chuck that responds to that regressive impulse.

A Universal Male Malady

Some critics have said that the film perpetuates an insidious stereotype by equating homosexuality with arrested development, but taken as a group, all of these movies are telling us that arrested development is a universal male malady, whether the guys are straight or gay.

It’s rare to see a female character who gets the same chance to extend her adolescence. In HBO’s “Sex and the City,” Kim Cattrall plays a happy-go-lucky hedonist who wouldn’t dream of settling down, but she’s a rare exception.

In his book “Love and Death in the American Novel,” Leslie Fiedler identified Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” as an archetypal American story because it memorializes “the flight of the dreamer from the shrew--into the mountains and out of time, away from the drab duties of home and town toward the good companions and the magic keg of beer.”

If movies suddenly feel an urge to revive this carefree type, that may be because he taps into some profound contemporary concerns--the grave doubts about the human costs of the raging new capitalist work ethic, the changing assumptions about gender roles in a post-feminist era. It is to the credit of the best of these new films that they rework this potent American myth with a keen perception of some of the dangers inherent in men’s undying eagerness to flee adult responsibility.