Movie's Rock

Singles (1992)

Romantic comedy about six of Seattle's young people, most of whom live in the same apartment building and whose lives revolve around the city's ever-expanding music scene. The inter-related stories about each character's progress through the singles scene are intriguing and often very funny, and the soundtrack is a grunge fanatic's dream, with the likes of Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Mudhoney

a movie review by: Jerry Saravia

Rating: 4 stars

Of Cameron Crowe's few films in his career as director, I count "Singles" as my absolute favorite, a sincere, hilarious, slightly satirical take on twentysomethings in Seattle, the land of good Starbucks coffee and endlessly rainy days.

We have Bridget Fonda as a cafe waitress with architectural ambitions who has a lunkheaded musician boyfriend (Matt Dillon) - he does not pay her as much mind as he should. They both live in a singles apartment complex, though not in the same apartment. The other tenants include Campbell Scott as the inventor of a new transportation system and Sheila Kelley as a desperate, shrill-voiced woman who seeks a date through a video service that specifically outlines her traits and sexual specialties (Tim Burton shows up here as a director who insists on designing her next video).

The delight in "Singles" is that the screenplay allows room for the characters to breathe and roam free based on their desires and emotions. Crowe has not written a plot to bring his characters together - he mostly devises ironic title cards like chapter stops for a series of events in his characters' lives. There is no dumb, recycled plot here, as in the similar but inconsequential "The Night We Never Met," to bring the film momentum. Sometimes there are breaks in time and space and other times, his characters speak right into the camera. It can be a disorienting device but Crowe uses it expertly to draw us closer to these people. My favorite moment was hearing Scott's story about his mother's advice to stay single when he was eight, and how he once mispronounced sperm as spam when he was a kid.

The funniest, truest moments are supplied by Bridget Fonda (a terrific comedienne), who can't figure out why her boyfriend won't pay attention to her and why her breasts are too small for him - Fonda has the spark and wit that was crucially missing from her performance in "Bodies, Rest and Motion." I enjoyed a scene where she flirts with the possibility of calling her boyfriend who has not called her when he should have. She decides that throwing a piece of paper in her trash can mean calling him or not calling him (and then she forgets what it initially meant).

Exceptionally winning are Matt Dillon as the rock singer who devises funny, disorganized lyrics on Fonda's answering machine; Campbell Scott as the straight, serious-minded guy who doesn't call his girlfriend a whole week after their first date to be different; and Kyra Sedgwick as the most sympathetic character (an environmentalist) who compliments Scott on his honesty - "You always say the perfect thing."

"Singles" is a wild, boisterous, smart, refreshingly simple and supremely entertaining take on the day-to-day basis in which twenty-year-olds live on their fears, their hopes, their agendas, their worries. Along with a great soundtrack with music by Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Smashing Pumpkins, this has got to be one of the best of the Generation X pictures of the 90's.