The story concerns the titular Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera, unsure and awkward as ever), a meek, 22-year-old nobody living in Toronto whose biggest accomplishment is playing bass in a punk rock band called Sex Bomb-Omb. His second biggest accomplishment is dating a high school senior named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), although they have yet to go beyond holding hands (is that even a base?). Scott’s romance with Knives is short-lived, however, because he soon falls head over heels for New York transplant Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a cynical beauty with an ever-changing head of primary-color-dyed hair. When Scott finally gets Ramona to go out with him (after a disastrous first meeting at a party when he tries to enthrall her with his story of how Pac-Man was originally called Puck-Man), he discovers that he is in way over his head. Romance with Ramona comes at a price: He must battle each of her seven evil exes, who have joined together into a league under the biggest and baddest ex of them all, a pretentious record producer named Gideon Gordon Graves (Jason Schwartzman).

That brief synopsis doesn’t even begin to do justice to Scott Pilgrim’s bizarre narrative detours and ADD-addled sensibilities, and that is just as well since this is a movie that really needs to be experienced firsthand; the result will be either a sense of giddy enthrallment or confused annoyance, determined largely by your tolerance for multimedia overload, shock cuts, and postmodern abandon. If you find yourself wondering why skinny, awkward Scott is suddenly able to fly like Superman and fight like Bruce Lee when confronted with one of the evil exes (or, for that matter, is able to command the attention of any females, much less two at the same time), then you’re probably in the wrong theater. You just have to go with the flow; otherwise you’re going to drown.

Director Edgar Wright, best known for his satirical collaborations with star Simon Pegg (2004’s Shawn of the Dead and 2007’s Hot Fuzz), knows that the material demands an all-or-nothing approach, and he cuts no corners in propelling the story forward with a gaggle of narrative, visual, and aural devices borrowed from every conceivable form of media: We get subtitle blocks informing us of character traits, canned laughter from sitcoms, shifting aspect ratios, cartoonish sounds writ large across the screen every time a phone rings or a bell whistles, split screens to mimic graphic novel layouts, video-game-like scores and avatars (including a “pee bar” when Scott needs to relieve himself), and plenty of slow motion so that we may indulge all the hyperkinetic, physics-defying movement, particularly the hyperbolic Looney Tunes-stylized violence. Characters are flung across rooms, slammed with giant hammers, and pummeled repeatedly with nary a scratch or dent to speak of; it is probably the closest Western cinema has come to the slapstick violence of Stephen Chow, and it doesn’t really matter if you view it all as straight-up literal or a chop-socky metaphor for Scott’s various insecurities. Take you pick.

Somewhere amidst all the visual overload the actors still manage to make an impression. Cera plays yet another variation on the stumbling, unsure Michael Cera hero, which works as a kind of anchor in the multimedia mayhem; we need that familiarity amid all the exaggeration, including his oversexed, but deadpan gay roommate (Kieran Culkin), the high-strung lead singer in his band (Mark Webber) and the perpetually angry female drummer (Kim Pine), and, of course, Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Ramona, the ultimate obscure object of desire whose seeming disengagement from anything emotional only makes her that much more desirable. The fact that the film manages to make us care about whether or not she and Scott wind up together may be its greatest feat.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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