138: whimsy in the quad

Giving 'Damsels in Distress' another chance

This is For Your (Re)Consideration the segment where I revisit things I didn’t like or I am ready to change my mind about. This one’s just for paid subscribers; consider a subscription today.

I’ve been revisiting Wes Anderson’s oeuvre recently, now that a bunch of his movies are on Hulu, so it seemed like the perfect time to revisit Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress. Anderson’s quippy and dry humor feels like a descendant of Stillman’s. Of the movies and books that I want to revisit, Damsels is so far the only one that I had originally never finished. I first tried to watch it in the ninth or tenth grade, after Tavi Gevinson had suggested it somewhere. I don’t think I was a Greta Gerwig fan yet, nor had I seen any of Stillman’s other movies. About thirty minutes in, I turned it off, finding every character totally insufferable and unrealistic. The vehemence I felt against this movie made a revisit even more necessary, particularly because since I first saw it over a decade (??) ago, I’ve become a pretty solid Whit Stillman fan. So what was the problem? Is Damsels in Distress just a lesser Stillman? Or was I just not primed to like it at fifteen?