August 4th, 2008
1. Elizabethtown (Kirsten Dunst)
Ah, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that sentient ray of sunshine sent from heaven to warm the heart and readjust the attitude of even the broodiest, most uptight male protagonist. In his My Year Of Flops entry on Elizabethtown, Nathan Rabin coined the phrase "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" to describe that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." In Elizabethtown, Kirsten Dunst plays the archetypal Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a flirty, flighty chatterbox stewardess who razzles and dazzles brooding sensitive guy Orlando Bloom. Coked up, or merely high on life? You be the judge. Though Dunst in Elizabethtown and Natalie Portman in Garden State epitomize the contemporary Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the strangely resilient archetype has its roots in the nutty dames of screwball comedy. For every era, there's a Manic Pixie Dream Girl perfectly suited to the times.
2. I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (Leigh Taylor-Young)
Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She's on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness. In the late '60s and early '70s, MPDGs often took the comely form of spacey hippie chicks burdened with getting grim establishment types to kick back and smell the flowers. In that respect, they mirrored mainstream culture's simultaneous suspicion and fascination with the open sexuality of the emergent counterculture. With the help of pot-laced brownies, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas' groovy free spirit Leigh Taylor-Young helps transform uptight Jew Peter Sellers from a stone-cold square to a swinging proponent of free love and sense derangement. But what does Taylor-Young ultimately want? As is usual with Manic Pixie Dream Girls, the filmmakers don't seem to have given the matter much thought.
3. Garden State (Natalie Portman)
Pharmaceutical companies have made billions peddling antidepressants to twentysomething white people who are, like, totally stressin' over people not appreciating them enough. Zach Braff did similarly well peddling two unusual but no less popular antidepressants in Garden State: The Shins and Natalie Portman. Braff's character is completely transformed when the latter introduces him to the former in a doctor's waiting room, with the plucky, annoying promise, "It'll change your life, I swear." Of course, anything sounds profound coming from such a dreamy woman. Oh, Natalie, your unconventional ways are so inspiring, and your beauty is surprisingly non-threatening! In Garden State, she's a loveably eccentric little angel in the body of a smokin'-hot goddess, spreading good cheer and tuneful indie rock to depressed boys everywhere.
4. Butterflies Are Free (Goldie Hawn)
Hawn began her acting career playing the ditz on TV comedies like Good Morning World and Laugh-In, but by the end of the '60s, her bubble-headed persona became less a figure of fun and more a love-generation ideal. She was the uncomplicated free spirit, unduly hassled by the establishment. Hawn won an Oscar for bringing that character to film in 1969's Cactus Flower, and then in 1972's Butterflies Are Free, she played a happy hippie who helps blind lawyer Edward Albert learn to live on his own and stand up to his fretful, frightful mother. Hawn's boyfriend doesn't care for her friendship with Albert, but what can he do? Hawn is a butterfly, man.
5. Almost Famous (Kate Hudson)
In Cameron Crowe's gilded memories of being a teenage rock critic on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine, his protagonist's muse is an idealistic groupie named Penny Lane. With blinkered idealism, the boy-critic gets all starry-eyed at her visions of the power of music, the freedom of life on the road, and the fantasy of staying young and beautiful forever. Even though Penny's incandescent charisma gets tarnished by that sex she claims she isn't having, not to mention an overdose that might not have been accidental, Crowe's stand-in has been transformed enough to defend her version of rock 'n' roll against the cynicism, infighting, and weariness of the band who won't return her devotion.
6. Joe Versus The Volcano (Meg Ryan)
Ryan plays three roles in 1990's Joe Versus The Volcano, only one of whom is a self-described "flibbertigibbet" (a sort of antiquated version of the MPDG). But since all Ryan's characters are aspects of the same dream woman, they all sport a little flibber. Their collective goal? To get mopey, nebbishy Tom Hanks to overcome his fears—including his concern that he's about to die from a fatal "brain cloud"—and enjoy life for a change. But if Hanks doesn't make it out of the film alive, no worries. The chipper, ever-life-altering Ryan will be waiting for him in Sleepless In Seattle and You've Got Mail, too.
7. The Apartment (Shirley MacLaine)
All Jack Lemmon wants to do is ascend the corporate ladder, even if that means loaning his bosses his terrific bachelor pad for their illicit trysts. Then one day he comes home to find that the peppy elevator operator he likes is lying comatose on his sofa, feeling suicidal after an affair gone wrong. He nurses her back to health and she turns his life upside down, talking a blue streak until she convinces him to adjust his values. This kind of troubled, worldly, yet surprisingly ebullient character became Shirley MacLaine's stock in trade throughout the late '50s and early '60s, in films like Some Came Running and Two For The Seesaw. Three years after 1960's The Apartment, she reunited with Lemmon and director Billy Wilder for Irma La Douce, in which she played the ultimate MPDG: a prostitute who corrupts the policeman trying to save her from the streets.
8. Bringing Up Baby (Katharine Hepburn)
For the bulk of her career, Katharine Hepburn played strong-willed patrician types who defied convention, but still maintained a baseline gravity. But in Howard Hawks' 1938 screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, Hepburn let gravity go, playing a giggly, scatterbrained heiress who torments stuffy scientist Cary Grant with her crazy demands and pet leopard. By the end of the film, Hepburn has turned Grant as nutty as she is, and as they hang from a crumbling dinosaur skeleton, he confesses that following her manic whims has led to the best day of his life.
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