When it was revealed that the movie of Nick Hornby’s highly popular novel, High Fidelity, would be transplanted from its native London to Chicago, fans worried about the project’s, er, fidelity to its source. Many thought there was something so quintessentially English about the novel that it would not survive the transition.
But they have been proved wrong. With director Stephen Frears (whose very interesting career reaches back to My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985 and includes Dangerous Liaisons) at the helm, and with John Cusack in the lead, it was in safe hands – and the result makes it clear that the issues at the heart of the novel are more-or-less universal, for the Anglo-American cultural sphere at least.
Cusack, always an intelligent and quirky actor (he previously worked with Frears on the brilliant The Grifters), plays the roles of co-producer and co-scriptwriter as well as that of Rob, owner of Championship Vinyl, a record store devoted to music as supplied on those old-fashioned black platters. He is in the throes of a relationship crisis – his girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle) has just walked out on him. This fracture makes him look back at his past collapsed relationships, as he tries to suss out what went wrong. Often hilariously, he revisits his interactions with several girlfriends, including the neurotic Sarah (Lili Taylor) and the ravishing Charlie (Catherine Zeta-Jones).
As with his friends and co-workers Dick (Todd Louiso) and Barry (Jack Black), Rob’s life is deeply entwined with music. Apart from his shop and his own vast record collection (which gets rearranged and reordered for apparently therapeutic purposes), there is his tendency to rate everything in terms of top fives – top five break-ups and so on. “What came first?” Rob asks at the start of the movie. “The music or the misery?” He’s heard so many songs about heartbreak that it’s hard for him to know whether his feelings are real or whether he’s channelling for some anguished torch-singer.
One might look at it the other way round, though: maybe Rob’s conception of love has been over-saturated with the romantic ecstasy purveyed by so many pop songs. Anyone who expects the real-life business of relationships to flow as smoothly as a Stevie Wonder ballad has a problem. Then again, as Dennis Potter demonstrated in his television quasi-musicals The Singing Detective and Lipstick on My Collar, there are times when a piece of music speaks as if directly from one’s own heart.
But that’s what Rob has to sort out, and, with irony and many a wry laugh amid the moping and obsessing, that’s what he does. Cusack is superb in the role of a man torn between youth and maturity, juggling his need for love and his fear of commitment. Setting the movie in his own hometown obviously helped him locate the character very precisely and place him neatly in his milieu. Black and Louiso are highly amusing as his eccentric sidekicks, and Tim Robbins is very funny indeed in a cameo as Laura’s new boyfriend, as is Joan Cusack, John’s sister, as Rob and Laura’s friend Liz.
High Fidelity is a romantic comedy with an edge (the British influence?), one that makes soppy Americana like Return to Me resemble recycled mush. And, whatever the state of your lovelife, you can sing along.