Roger Holland on the ‘ultimate everyman’, John Cusack…
This article contains a fair few spoilers. If you haven’t seen Say Anything, Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity, shame on you. Also you may want to stop reading.
Following her break-up with Lloyd Dobler, Diane Court lies in bed unable to sleep. Faintly at first, the sounds of music start to come through her open window. She realises the song is Peter Gabriel’s ‘In Your Eyes’, a song she and him had shared in a particularly tender moment, ‘their song’. Cut to outside and we see Cusack, in a brown trench coat, standing in front of his car with a boombox thrust above his head playing the song at her bedroom window. It’s a classic scene, one which has been referenced and parodied frequently in both television, films and pop music. And its easy to see why, who amongst us has seen that scene and not wanted to do that? It’s a sure-fire winner, a last-ditch attempt of yearning affection. It seems to unite both male and female audiences, females who think it’s wonderfully romantic, and males who think ‘Yeah, that’s pretty awesome.’
Lloyd Dobler is, like the other Cusack roles I’m going to discuss, the ultimate everyman, the charismatic under-achiever with a heart of gold, making him instantly relatable to audiences. Women want him, Men want to be him. It’s this successful formula that, although occasionally prompting typecasting accusations, Cusack has successfully built a career on. His CV covers a broad range of genres, but its the character studies that I really want to focus on, films like Say Anything and High Fidelity, where the humour and drama come more from the characters, from Cusack, than from the situations they’re involved in.
In Say Anything, it’s Lloyd’s persistence and earnestness that ultimately wins Diane’s heart and in other actors hands, this could come across as saccharine or unbelievable. Not so here though, with Cusack developing a believable, credible nice-guy character, aided by the brother-sister dynamic of real-sibling Joan Cusack and the circle of female friends that ground the character and offer advice (as well as providing some of the film’s funniest scenes, most notably Lili Taylor’s musician character Corey). It’s through Cusack making the situation believable that one can almost draw inspiration from Lloyd, that just through persistence and being yourself you can ‘get the girl’. It sounds corny (well, it is) but its also kinda true.
Take Grosse Pointe Blank. Cusack plays Martin Blank, a thirty-something hitman reluctantly attending his high-school reunion. His assistant, Joan Cusack in another brother-sister role, essentially forces him to go after finding a ‘job’ for him conveniently in the same town as the reunion. Another hitman, played by Dan Ackroyd, is seeking to recruit him for an ‘Assassin’s Union ‘, and pesters Blank throughout the film. On top of this, federal agents are pursuing him as well as a hit man contracted to kill him. Despite all this, Blank encounters Debi, his ‘long-lost-love’ who he hasn’t seen since he stood her up at the prom, and through Debi and some other old friends, learns some things about himself.
Although it’s most likely the majority of us can’t directly relate to the character of an assassin for hire, Cusack imbues the role with his average-man likeability. He’s just another bored, depressed guy like you and I, lamenting his old high-school crush and seeking some kind of meaning in his life. Although I’ve got to put my hand up and say, I’ve never killed a man with a ballpoint pen.
High-school is one of those strange places that has essentially been fetishised by scores of teen dramas and high-school sitcoms, so much so that we’ve pretty much forgotten what our own (frequently disappointing) time spent in high-school actually was like. We view the period through a rose tinted silver screen, projecting our own desires and failures on the characters in these films as they navigate the treacherous period with far more wit and grace than we could ever have hoped for. So when Cusack returns to his home town and discovers that some people and places have changed and some have remained, we think of our own high-school lives and first crushes and begin to wonder if that youthful exuberance is something we can recapture, as Cusack attempts to do.
Blank’s relationship with Minnie Driver’s Debi is also realistically played out. She is obviously still carrying a grudge against Martin and it takes some time for him to eventually win his way back into her heart (after some bizarre events including Debi’s father being ‘the job’ aka Martin’s next target). She is initially apprehensive at his reappearance and is later shocked to discover that he really is an assassin. His cold attitude towards his work and ultimately, life also scares her.
It’s through utter honesty with her and a new-found respect for life that Blank finds redemption through Debi. Is that something we can do? Like Cusack’s character, is the key to our own happiness, our redemption from our lives, to revisit past mistakes and past loves and either set them right or learn from them? Grosse Pointe Blank isn’t the only film in Cusack’s CV to suggest this.
High Fidelity, in fact illustrates my last point beautifully. Cusack play Rob Gordon, a grumpy (but naturally, likeable) record store owner and music enthusiast, reeling after his girlfriend Laura leaves him. The majority of the film involves Rob visiting the women from his ‘Top 5 Breakups’ list and seeking closure and insight from them, before realising its Laura he always wanted and winning her back.
The film features a lot of direct to camera monologues from Cusack, placing the viewer in almost a direct diatribe with him, making his problems our problems. This is because they already are the same problems we have. I for one will confess to trivialising my life into ‘Top 5’ style mental lists and I know I’m not the only one out there. The content stems directly from the book the film is based on by Nick Hornby, who as a British music enthusiast, is almost alarming similar to myself and many of my friends.
But Cusack, using his patent ‘everyman-ness’ truly brings the material to life. Rob Gordon feels like a friend of ours, of even ourselves, as he navigates his former loves for meaning. I mean, who hasn’t looked to Bruce Springsteen for help? The film makes the metaphor literal, as Springsteen appears to Rob and offers the advice he needs.
Rob’s two friends / employees, are also amusingly familiar. Barry and Dick, or as Rob dubs them, ‘The musical moron twins’, are hilarious reflections of our friends (or even ourselves!). Constantly bickering, opinionated and funny (although irritating for Rob), Barry is a loud, obnoxious music-fascist and Dick is a quiet music-geek, obsessed with rare, obscure music. You can certainly see elements of people you know in the pair. They’d be stereotypes if they weren’t so disarmingly true!
Cusack’s most recent role in Hot Tub Time Machine finds him once again playing the jaded nice guy, returning to his youth to meet former loves and gain insight into himself. While it is through the rather unrealistic vehicle of a time travelling hot tub, Cusack’s revelations are similar to the ones he experiences in High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Blank, revisiting his old life to work out what went wrong. This film however, allows him to literally change his mistakes through the medium of time travel. While we may not be able to go back in time to sort out lives out, it’s certainly a sentiment echoing across both Cusack’s roles and our own lives.
So, if you need to, go do it. Make that Top 5 break up list. Go to your high school reunion. Revisit your old life and learn from it or change you life for the better. Or, like Lloyd Dobler, be yourself. Because it worked for Cusack. So maybe it can work for us too.
“Thanks Boss”.
Related:
Thoughts on… Hot Tub Time Machine
Originally published May 10, 2010. Updated April 10, 2018.
