The Frame

This often gets tagged as “Jane Austen in Manhattan,” but really, it’s an apropos description. I’ve heard people say it’s basically Mansfield Park, but I haven’t read Mansfield Park, so I couldn’t say. The film follows a group of Manhattan socialite teenagers from party to party, focusing in especially on the one outsider, a boy from the blue-collar classes who has to rent a tux and pretend he likes to walk to avoid letting his new friends know he has to take the bus home. Though they find out soon enough, they keep him around because his intellectual nattering amuses them. In fact, it’s quite amazing that this film is interesting at all, given the amount of pseudo-intellectual nattering that goes on, from all the characters. But it is. It’s a very well-realized exploration of the wealth-based class system that exists in the United States, despite our protestations that we don’t have class stratification here.
Well Above Average