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Hmm. How to describe Ghost World? It's easy enough to outline the plot, I suppose, but that wouldn't entirely be doing it justice. It is a start, though, so: Enid and Rebecca are two friends just about to graduate from high school. The movie really begins, in fact, at their graduation ceremony. The two share a disaffected and cynical outlook on life, coupled with a complete sense of loss about what to do now that they've graduated (well, hold on a sec--Enid discovers when she opens her diploma that she didn't pass one of her classes and so she's going to have to take an art class during summer session to actually graduate).
As the movie progresses, the interests of the two friends begin to diverge somewhat. Rebecca gets a job, even if it is a loser job behind the counter of the local coffee shop, and wants she and Enid to get their own apartment. Enid, on the other hand, is still spinning her wheels. Early on, the two play a practical joke on the placer of a personal ad in the paper, leaving a message on his machine to the effect that they are the blonde at the airport with whom he "shared a moment," and would he please meet her at such-and-such diner. Then they get a booth at the diner at the appointed time in order to snicker behind their menus when the poor mope shows up and eventually realizes he's been stiffed. It's cruel, and when they run into said mope again at a local flea-market, Enid is motivated to befriend him (something Rebecca has a hard time understanding).
This is a low-key movie, with an often keen eye for some of the absurdities encountered by the recently graduated but still clueless. Thora Birch does a very nice job as Enid, giving her the right touch of aimlessness and disaffection without making her too unsympathetic or allowing the audience to completely lose sight of her submerged idealism. Steve Buscemi really comes through playing the middle-aged geek that Enid befriends. He's a geek, and he knows he's a geek, and it's not so much that he's fine with that as that he seems to be in a sort of sad, uneasy equilibrium state.
Ghost World is a good antidote if you've seen one too many movies with just a little too much pep and canned optimism, particularly of the teen movie variety. I wouldn't call it a comedy, exactly, although it has a mordant wit and is often quite funny. The ending is ambiguously open-ended--Enid could be heading off to find herself and what she needs to be happy, or she could just as easily end up turning tricks in the big city inside three months. Being a bit of an optimist myself, I prefer to take the first interpretation....
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