Frears' best film in a while. (possible spoilers)

Rating: 6/10 (24 July 2000)

'High Fidelity' is about fidelity, and not just of the relationship sort. It is about music, about how we use it to express emotions we cannot - the insights of the songs have a high fidelity to the way we feel. But somehow the medium has obscured the message, and Rob has become more obsessed by the emotions in songs than the real-life emotions they are supposed to reflect. The former without the latter becomes a sterile, self-glorifying thing - music provides the ready-made emotions so we don't have to go through the experiences needed to feel them. It's a bit like 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' - when Barry sings a horribly slick, muzak 'Let's Get it On' at the climax, the authenticity of the Marvin Gaye original has been seeped out to a series of amusing postures - we have sucked out others' emotions so that they become pods, and we cover versions.
Or, 'Fidelity' is about maturity. Specifically male maturity. About the inability of boys to give up the signs of adolescent independence. Laura says Rob never changes, develops, progresses as a person. The collecting and classifying of things is a conservative act, a way of building up so much baggage you can't move. This is not necessarily unadmirable. The real world isn't very nice. The world of music and lists is a nurturing womb far more reassuring than real mother 'love'; it doesn't tell you you're a failure. Liking independent records is a mark of independence; running an independent store, and not some megastore, is a refusal to play the corporate game. Rob can only sustain this fantasy, of course, by scabbing off his girlfriend. Independence is a myth.
So it is with independence in movies. 'Fidelity' might like to see itself as an opposition to generic Hollywood fare - its dish of intelligence, verbosity, character and sense of locale an alternative to the fast food of blockbusters, dumb thrills, idiotic dialogue, stereotypes and flashy visuals. And 'Fidelity' does kind of ramble instead of offering a conventional three-act-structure. It mocks (rather misogynistically?) starlets for their powerful vacuity. It disrupts its boy-girl conflict/resolution with a very adult and unusual doubt and lack of closure. The final ambiguous scene suggest that Rob has finally matured, but also suggests that he is trying to subsume maturity into his unchanging way of life, a project which can only fail.
The brilliant thing about this film is that it all takes place in Rob's head. Although he doesn't actually seem to like music all that much, the music in the soundtrack, rather archly, comments on his state of mind. Characters and events subtly change or are reinterpreted the more insights he develops. The mixture of to-camera narration and drama has been done before, but usually the boundaries are drawn - here the mixture of commentary and action within the one narrative means that one always undermines the other, and we we can clearly see the holes in Rob's solipsistic house of cards. It is easy to forget, such is his verbal facility and winning charm, how many truly ghastly characters John Cusack plays (in this duality he is very much like James Woods), and Rob here is a monster, a raving egotist, who appropriates everything to his own self-image, including the weather (all that pneumonia-free rain).
This is a hugely enjoyable film, full of great insights, comic set-pieces and moments of recognition that made me squirm. Stephen Frears more usually deals with combinations of people than with one overpowering individual and Rob's monomania soon becomes wearing; the best scenes are those featuring Jack Black, as everyone's been saying. Frears always excels at a sense of place, especially interiors, a place where people actually live and are defined, and this film is no exception, the bureaucratic stacks of plastic ultimately exposing and overpowering Rob's emotional emptiness.
But 'Fidelity' is, if I may say so under IMDb guidelines, as irritating as it is entertaining. I love John Cusack, and he is superb, unafraid to be dislikeable; but too many of his films are the same, so that there is a mini-genre, the John Cusack film. I just wish he's try to be a little more adventurous.