The film is a satirical look at a small group of highly privileged Manhattan teenage socialites -- debutantes and their male "escorts" -- who spend their college Christmas vacation at home in Manhattan, attending black-tie dances and parties every evening before rounding out the night with intimate after-parties in their Park Avenue apartments. Mostly they party at the home of Sally Fowler (Dylan Hundley), which is why they call themselves the SFRP, or Sally Fowler Rat Pack. They talk about literature, sociology, politics, and sex and romance. The group's newcomer is Tom (Edward Clements), a relatively "poor" member who lives on the west side (gasp!), doesn't take cabs (gasp!), and wears a raincoat because he can't afford a proper overcoat.
This is a world -- and a film -- in which talk is taken very seriously, relays much meaning, and can wound people. Yet for all the scenes of people talking in rooms -- which make up almost the entire movie -- Metropolitan has something interesting and witty to say about this very specific subset of New York society. One character, Charlie (Taylor Nichols), coins the acronym UHB, for Upper Haute Bourgeoisie, to describe their class, because "it's ridiculous to refer to someone like Averell Harriman as a preppy."
Charlie also says, "I think that we are all, in a sense, doomed. We hear a lot about the great social mobility in America... What is less discussed is how easy it is to go down." Whit Stillman later said he wrote that speech late at night at a restaurant in Cannes in 1985, when he was feeling "pretty marginal." Stillman was then working in film distribution; he had previously dabbled in publishing and journalism. Before that, he had attended Harvard, and before Harvard, he had been part of the New York debutante scene himself, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (The movie is set "not too long ago.")
Stillman wrote Metropolitan sporadically over four years in the mid-1980s, then raised money from friends and relatives to finance it. He even sold his New York apartment to raise more cash. He cast the film entirely with first-timers via open casting calls, drawing from drama schools and theater programs. Only two of his eventual actors had any prep school background. "I wanted a group of new faces," said Stillman, "which was fortunate because I couldn't have afforded any old faces."
Shooting took place in Super-16mm over five 80-hour weeks, entirely in New York locations. In the early days of filming, Stillman could be seen referring to a book called How to Direct a Movie. His small budget forced him to get creative. He chose to set the story at Christmas-time because he figured the city was especially photogenic at that time of year, which itself would add to the film's visual attractiveness. And "since the cost of any crane or dolly shot would have come out of my own wallet," he said, "I found myself thinking about the need for them very, very critically. Then I had a cheapskate brainstorm: eliminate camera movement altogether and make it a 'style.'"
He also recalled that "our attempt to give the film an 'indefinite-past' period feeling was helped by the coincidence that the people who leave their cars parked on midtown streets all night tend to have really old cars. Those '70s Plymouth wagons parked in the background were for free." But most of Metropolitan was filmed in a beautiful East Side mansion once owned by Alan Jay Lerner. Stillman got permission to shoot there from 6pm to dawn for many nights.
The finished product was rejected by all distributors. Then, in January 1990, it got into Sundance -- which at the time was called the Sundance United States Film Festival -- and drew raves. In March, it played in the New Directors/New Films Festival in New York, where New York Times critic Vincent Canby pronounced it "[an] unequivocal hit... a comedy of manners of a very high order... [Stillman] sees this special Manhattan world through the good satirist's bifocal lenses."
The movie was then acquired by New Line Cinema, accepted into the Cannes Film Festival, and opened commercially that July. It became an art-house hit and won notable awards such as Best New Director from the New York Film Critics Circle, and Best First Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, but lost to Ghost (1990).
Critics and audiences responded to Metropolitan's sophisticated satire, which gently mocks its characters rather than overtly or gratuitously judging them. Trade paper Variety called it "strikingly original," and critic Roger Ebert wrote: "Stillman has made a film Scott Fitzgerald might have been comfortable with, a film about people covering their own insecurities with a facade of social ease. And he has written wonderful dialogue, words in which the characters discuss ideas and feelings instead of simply marching through plot points as most Hollywood characters do. Not very much happens in Metropolitan, and yet everything that happens is felt very deeply, because the characters in this movie are still too young to have perfected their defenses against life."
By Jeremy Arnold
