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My First Mister (2001)
Directed by
Christine Lahti
Screenplay by
Jill Franklyn
Winner of a 1996 Academy Award© for her distinctive short film Lieberman in Love, acclaimed actress Christine Lahti makes her feature film directing debut in the heartfelt dramatic comedy My First Mister. Perceptive and touching, the picture portrays an unlikely bond between two total opposites. As their relationship develops, a friendship that seemed impossible becomes inevitable.
Jennifer (Leelee Sobieski) is seventeen, just graduated from high school in a ceremony she made certain not to attend. With her multiple piercings, all-black wardrobe and frequent cemetery visits, Jennifer works hard to keep the world at a distance. She has devised her own individual goth/punk disguise to protect the lonely girl inside. Yet her cynicism is only skin deep, masking a deep sense that she is not worth loving. Fascinated with death because she is afraid of life, Jennifer is more innocent and more in need than she would ever dare let on.
With all her rebel street girl pose, Jennifer still lives at home, engaged in constant battle with her chirpy musical-comedy obsessed mother Sylvie (Carol Kane). Scarred by divorce and scared of the changes her daughter is undergoing, Sylvie relies on near-terminal optimism as a defense mechanism. Jennifer's hippie dad Ben (John Goodman) moved out a long time ago and steers clear of any real involvement in his daughter's life. A sense of humor is Jennifer's saving grace, demonstrated in the self-deprecating sharpness of her journals. ("My clothes are not all black. Some of them are blue. Sometimes I wear them together so I look like a bruise.")
Randall (Albert Brooks) stands in complete contrast - a precise, well-ordered man of forty-nine who runs a conservative men's clothing store in an upscale shopping mall. Randall keeps everything under control. He lives alone. A magazine subscription is about the biggest personal commitment he will venture to make. He is unfailingly polite and carefully tailored - a "nice man" to the core. Yet underneath all the protective coloring of middle class comfort, Randall is deeply afraid, nursing secret regrets about the past and hidden terror of the future. His loneliness is awesome.
Each of them long-term prisoners of their own highly developed emotional armor, this wildly dissimilar pair should never meet, never connect at all. Yet one day, after initially rejecting her job application, Randall observes that Jennifer is still sullenly planted in front of his shop window. "You're scaring the customers," he suggests, trying to convince her to move away. But the rebel girl stays her ground and with impudent wit, she soon makes him laugh. Against his better judgment, Randall offers her a stockperson job, if and only if she goes home and removes "the facial jewelry." A bit surprised at the decision herself, Jennifer takes him up on the offer.
Proving her value quickly, moving out from the stockroom and on to the sales floor, Jennifer soon discovers that Randall is different from most all the adults she has encountered in her life. He tends to tell the truth, and he has a well-honed sense of his own limitations. Randall pays real attention to her. They share more and more of their personal interests, and in the process, begin to open up about their mutual fears. Jennifer fantasizes about what Randall might be like as her lover, but in the coffeehouse she frequents, it is assumed he is her dad. Randall succeeds in showing her there is more to life than death-haunted imagery. He even moves a few inches towards her lifestyle, giving the cemetery trip a brave try, but stopping well short of getting a tattoo.
When Jennifer makes the critical step of getting her own apartment, it is Randall who is there to offer support. She finds herself jealous of Patty (Mary Kay Place), the warm and kind woman Randall's own age who seems all too interested in his well-being. Yet Jennifer also begins to realize how many secrets Randall is keeping from her. It just does not make sense to Jennifer that a man she is growing to care about, the one man she dares to trust, can remain so tightly wrapped in his own isolation, so shut off from her. Something has to snap.
Piecing together the evidence and deeply disturbed by some of the discoveries she makes, Jennifer determines to find the true source of his solitude. Her mission takes her on a trip out of Los Angeles, tracing clues about Randall's past back to Arizona.
There she meets a handsome young man, Randy (Desmond Harrington), whose cynical anger at the world seems to closely parallel her own. The two soon discover that they have something they share that surpasses attitude. By the time Jennifer is ready to head back to Los Angeles, she has convinced Randy to accompany her. Driven by a new purpose, Jennifer grows increasingly passionate about making connections. Family takes on new meaning. She becomes the catalyst for a new family that is being born - one strong enough to deal with loss and change.
With warmth, a clear eye, and deep understanding, Christine Lahti captures the essence of Jill Franklyn's wry and knowing screenplay. She shows how often in life it is the small tentative moves, the baby steps, that point to great affections and signal true transformation.
My First Mister is much more than a "coming of age" story. It is about how all of us come to terms - with more than a little help from our friends.
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Christine Lahti
A drama major at the University of Michigan, Lahti worked extensively on stage before making a stunning film debut as an attorney in EB>. And Justice for All (1979), more than holding her own opposite Al Pacino. Lahti was equally impressive as a doctor in Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981), but somehow failed to click with audiences. After showstealing best-pal roles in Swing Shift (1984, an Oscar-nominated performance) and Just Between Friends (1986), she graduated to offbeat leads in a pair of 1987 art films, Stacking and Housekeeping followed by a magnificent performance as the wife-and-mother-in-hiding in Running on Empty (1988). Her considerable range, as well as her apparent affinity for colorful characters, hasn't limited Lahti to conventional leading-lady partsbut that one role, that one great script, continues to elude her. A long dry spell has included Gross Anatomy (1989), Funny About Love (1990), and The Doctor (1991). In the wake of 1991's popular Thelma & Louise Lahti costarred in the female road movie Leaving Normal (1992). Married to director Thomas Schlamme, for whom she did a gag cameo in Miss Firecracker (1989), and who directed her in the well-received madefor-TV movie Crazy From the Heart (1991). Other prominent TV movie credits include Amerika (1987), No Place Like Home (1989), and The Good Fight (1992).
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Albert Brooks
as Randall
It's not entirely surprising that a comedian's son named Albert Einstein would grow up to be both cerebral and funny. (His father was radio comedian Parkyakarkus.) Brooks got his show-biz start as a variety show writer and performer, and always displayed a unique sensibility-appearing on "The Tonight Show" as a talking mime, for instance. He also recorded several outstanding comedy albums. His first film, a short subject called The Famous Comedians School was aired on the early 1970s PBS series "The Great American Dream Machine." Brooks refined his deadpan style of fauxcinema-verité in a series of shorts for TV's "Saturday Night Live," and then expanded the notion for Real Life (1979), a feature-length spoof of the PBS series "An American Family," which he directed, cowrote, and starred in. (He also filmed a sidesplitting coming-attractions trailer for the film, promoting it in a bogus 3-D format.) It won excellent reviews but did little business, a pattern sustained by Brooks' subsequent features, the angstridden comedy Modern Romance (1981), the yuppies-as-Easy-Rider Lost in America (1985), and the afterlife romp Defending Your Life (1991). His films never quite hit a comic bull's-eye, but they are invari ably filled with clever ideas and memorable moments.
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Leelee: "My First Mister was definitely more of an intellectual type of film, and was a completely different genre -- dramedy -- than the other two. Not to say that something like a 'Joy Ride' or a 'Glass House' doesn't require 100 percent of your emotional involvement, but in those kinds of films the situation can take over instead of the character development ... Although I think 'Joy Ride' has very good character work, also."
"I actually really like that facial metal look, but I don't even have my ears pierced, so my rebellion is completely in the other direction. But I loved seeing myself with all of that; I kept it all, the tattoos and the wig, too. I wear the wig all the time."
"Albert Brooks is phenomenal. So smart, so funny. My character falls in love with him and it's so easy. He's a really lovable person. It's platonic. It's not older man, younger girl. I've seen that way too many times. It's a friendship. She obsesses over him because he's the first person that's given her love and acceptance of who she is. He's trying to figure her out so he picks up a 'Seventeen' magazine and this woman looks over at him and he says 'Oh, I thought this was about cars' or 'Oh, this is for teenagers' and walks away. He's nervous about the situation."
"One of the interesting things about My First Mister is that the character of J starts out very vulnerable. The standard progression in a film would be to see the tough-looking girl as hard in the beginning, then watch her softer side develop. "
"I’m sure if someone else played it, she might have been much tougher in the beginning. Okay, here’s the difference. I think when you see a character like that with other people, she’s one way, but when you see a character like that by herself, she’s another way. If you could generalize and say, "That type of character," if you see that type of character on the street, they’re very tough. The reason they’re very tough is because they’re very vulnerable, otherwise they wouldn’t have to prove they’re tough on the exterior. So if you see someone like that alone in her bedroom, she might be crying; if you see her on the street, she might say, "Fuck you." And the only reason she would say, "Leave me alone, I hate you," any harsh thing she can come up with, is because she wants someone to fight to be close to her because she wants someone to love and accept her. "
"At the end of the filming I got really depressed and for a little while I kind of became like the J character at the beginning of the film. I went a little bit too deep into her character and I was really sad at the end of the filming. I didn’t choose to do that. I didn’t say, ‘I’m going to be a method actress and jump into this character.’ But I ended up doing that. I really like her a lot. I don’t mean I really like me a lot, but I feel she’s an interesting person. Like a Joan of Arc was interesting to play because she’s an interesting person. "
"Christine Lahti gave me such a tremendous amount of freedom. It was really great. I really got to jump in and create this person. I had so much freedom. We went to a goth club together, which was very funky. I think it was like our third meeting or something, and so we went to this goth club, but we had gone to dinner before so we weren’t very goth. But it was great and I’ve been back many times. I love it. "
Christine Lahti: "I would never make a movie about a sexual relationship between an older man and a young girl, we have way too many of those, and they’re kind of pathetic."
Albert Brooks: "That’s why I love this movie, it’s like there’s some unwritten law that people of different generations can’t help each other without the bed being involved."
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