Enid launches a new campaign for her kindred spirit, a hopeless quest to find him a female counterpart. Seymour has doubts. "I don't want to meet someone who shares my interests," he whines. "I hate my interests." Their search accentuates what they already know: that they can't relate to 90 percent of the people in this bland modern world which they abhor. When Enid brings Seymour to a rowdy blues bar, she tallies potential male partners for herself and finds only phonies with a myopic sense of how nice everything seems. It's Seymour's honesty she admires. He's so unhip, he's actually cool. To her dismay, Seymour begins dating a perky real estate agent with whom he has nothing in common and Enid mourns another friend to the realm of pseudo-happiness.
Ghost World works like a not-so-secret message in code, a happy face sticker with a minus sign for a mouth or a T-shirt that warns, "smiling is a warning sign of a stroke." Far from a stylized cartoon of our own wretched outland, it's a surreal, coloring book outline with telling details, populated with caricatures of every familiar hometown nutcase, like the wizened old man in a rumpled suit who waits on a bench for a bus that will never arrive. According to Enid, he's the only one she can count on.
Based on the smart mouth characters in Dan Clowes' underground comic book and brought to the big screen by prize-winning documentary filmmaker Terry Zwigoff (Crumb), the film doesn't content itself with clever answers. It lets us into Enid's world without allowing us to feel superior. As enacted by Birch, Enid is far more convincing than the cutting, verbally-acrobatic kids of typical teen comedies. Under her hard-edged surface lies a sweeter center, not dissimilar to the film itself. She is always fascinating to watch--whether cracking wise or sitting still, listening to the running commentary in her head.
Who else but Buscemi could play Seymour? One of Enid's drawings (pulled off by R. Crumb's daughter Sophie, a cartoonist, while Clowes did most of the other art, including the credits) brilliantly links Seymour to Don Knotts. Other memorable performances include Illeana Douglas as Enid's self-important art teacher, a politically correct feminist who praises coat-hanger collages. These characters work because they are so specific and believable. In the end, Ghost World takes a risk that illustrates how Enid and Seymour have finally snapped out of their stupor, if not solved all their problems by crossing paths. His loneliness has stamped out her own.
