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.
[pagebreak]
9. What's Up, Doc? (Barbra Streisand)
In Peter Bogdanovich's 1972
homage to Bringing Up Baby and Looney
Tunes cartoons, Streisand plays a pesky chatterbox who endeavors to help dreary
musicologist Ryan O'Neal get the grant he's after, but instead succeeds in
driving a wedge between O'Neal and his fiancée, and getting him embroiled in
espionage and jewel thievery. Streisand's character never really has any
plausible motivation: She's just an anarchic change agent, pitched halfway
between a screwball heroine and a cartoon character. Yet after spending a
weekend with her, O'Neal is in a better place financially, romantically, and
career-wise. Funny how things work out.
10. Annie Hall (Diane Keaton)
The grand champion of the MPDG
fighting league, '70s division, just might be Diane Keaton as the title
character in Woody Allen's most good-natured film. The fact that she pulled
this off in a world that let Goldie Hawn run around loose is just a further
testament to how completely Keaton filled out the role of what otherwise could
have been a shallow wish-fulfillment fantasy. Her character certainly does have
wish-fulfillment elements. But while it's hard to believe such a woman could
exist, it's very easy to believe that if she did, she'd be a perfect match for
Allen's prototypically nebbishy character, Alvy Singer. If ever there was a
comedian who needed to lighten up, it was him, and if there was ever a woman
who could make him do it with just a "la-di-dah," it was her.
11. Breakfast At Tiffany's (Audrey Hepburn)
In Truman Capote's short novel Breakfast
At Tiffany's, Holly Golightly is a sexually
adventurous woman who jumps from man to man, living off the gifts she extorts
from them, and changing casually with the seasons. In the film version, Audrey
Hepburn plays Holly as a chaste party girl who shares her opinions easily, but
keeps her affections to herself (and her cat). Nevertheless, Hepburn-Holly
charms writer George Peppard to such an extent that he's able to give up the
rich older woman who helps subsidize his work, and instead offer his devotion
to his erratic dream woman—who improbably, in contradiction to Capote's
book, accepts.
12. Something Wild (Melanie Griffith)
Straitlaced corporate drone Jeff Daniels desperately needs some screws
loosened: His life sucks, and his family is suffocating him. But in the movies, there's always
a MPDG around to show the buttoned-up bores how to live. In this case, it's
crazy Lulu—later transformed into demure Audrey—who kidnaps him and
pushes him into a road trip, complete with assumed identities and murderous
mobsters. For a generation
of young urban professionals, the indelible image of Griffith ripping her tank
top apart while straddling a mortified but excited Daniels forever defined what
kind of mania they wanted to see in their pixie dream girls.
13. Sweet November (Charlize
Theron)
Terminally ill Earth mother Charlize Theron makes things easy for uptight
business-dude Keanu Reeves in 2001's Sweet November, an appropriately maudlin remake of the 1968
tearjerker. She enters Reeves' life, imbues it with meaning, then leaves,
saving her new beau from the agony of watching her perish. Theron promises to
change Reeves' life in a single month, and through highs, lows, and rampant
quirkiness, she does just that. By the time she's exited his life, he's
regained his joie de vivre and has been blessed with a haunted, vulnerable look
that will be catnip to future MPDGs looking for a man to inspire.
14. Autumn In New York (Winona
Ryder)
See above. Joan Chen's directorial debut, Autumn In New York, is a
strange cross between Sweet November and the culture-clash square-dude-meets-hippie-chick romantic subgenre
of the Woodstock era. In 2000's Autumn In New York, the
square dude in question is uptight businessman Richard Gere, and the charming
minx who breathes life into his sorry existence and reawakens his libido is
delightful pixie/crazy free spirit Winona Ryder, who, like Theron, nurses the
tragic secret that she's terminally ill. They live, they love, and then that
whole tragic-early-death thing enters the equation. Bummer city.
15. The Last Kiss (Rachel Bilson)
Noted MPDG magnet Zach Braff went
to the wedding in the pivotal scene of The Last Kiss soaked through with 30s ennui, and with the
oppressive, leaden weights of adulthood, responsibility, and attractive, utterly
devoted girlfriend Jacinda Barrett hanging around his neck. Clearly, he needed
an escape from his prison of a life. Trailed by a cloud of flowing brunette
hair, in walks Rachel Bilson, a chatty, smiley, flirty college student who is
actually so diminutive that she's technically a regulation-size pixie. They
laugh, they chat, they exchange meaningful glances, and Braff discovers that
she's everything his girlfriend isn't: short, 22 years old, and carefree.
Unfortunately, Bilson is also manic, and her mania doesn't surface until after
they have sex in her dorm room, once Braff's regret is in full, watery-eyed
bloom.
16. My Sassy Girl (Elisha Cuthbert)
We're speculating here, since
this forthcoming MPDG movie is currently only available in trailer form, but if
there were an assembly line for Manic Pixie Dream Girls—and there
probably is somewhere—Elisha Cuthbert went straight from the
manufacturing facility and onto a subway railing to be saved by Jesse Bradford
in My Sassy Girl. From the endearing way
she slaps him without provocation to the adorable voices she seems to hear in
her head, Cuthbert puts the "charming" in "charmingly mentally impaired." She's
just the dash of acute manic depression that a staid, sensible-sweater-wearing
guy like Bradford needs. As Bradford's token chubby best friend reminds him, "She's
a nutjob!" Bradford's response, "But I love her." Those lines fully sum up the
plot of any movie featuring a MPDG.