I recently had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion with director and screenwriter Whit Stillman. If you’re not familiar with his work, you should change that. His four films feature interesting settings but center in on the kind of conversations that smart young people often have with each other: sensitive, self-involved, sometimes pretentious, occasionally insightful, and full of acerbic wit. This is not to say that the overall tone of his films are snarky; in fact, the nuance and honesty that pervades his portrayal of this WASP-y social life is what makes his films watchable and edifying.
In person, Stillman is a thoughtful and reserved man, offering choice pieces of dry humor to conversations in which he’s involved. He provided a particularly memorable answer to one audience members question about his choice of medium for storytelling. Stillman transitioned from fictional writing to film because he was always very uncomfortable with the tendency of readers to identify one character in a story as the spokesperson for the author himself. In film, Stillman claims, no one assumes one character is a mouthpiece for the director.
Stillman seems uninterested in defending theses through stories. He is often billed as a modern champion for morals and decency, especially in high society. I’m not sure he’d claim this title for himself. Stillman does involve the moral sensibilities of Jane Austen or Samuel Johnson in his films, but he doesn’t champion these the way many conservatives claim he does. He seems to favor them, but retains an ambiguity as to the elements of a life well-lived. That’s what makes his conversation-centric films so interesting; when his characters discuss things, every point of view is colored with a bit of human silliness present in the speaker. The conversations aren’t means to a moral-message end. They’re truly vulnerable, stumbling attempts to clear away the junk cluttering our modern imaginations.
