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Jane and Grover's chance meeting at the 'townie' bar - favorite scene

posted 8 years ago by longlost-44286
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I believe the scene with Jane and Grover's chance meeting at the townie bar is one to go down in independent movie history. It is both a captivating and a moving scene which represents a perfect blend of just the right amount of emotion and humor epitomizing a semiotic balance between the spoken and the unspoken, as the two basic parameters the scene revolves around.
It’s daytime and Grover happens upon Jane at the bar - probably expecting to find her there - and after a fair share of drinks they sit down at their table and the magic of this scene starts to unravel. They realize they are both hammered, share a couple of semantically flawless repartees (as to be expected from creative writing majors) and some innocent yet flirtatious looks after which Jane realizes she is late for her therapist’s appointment and gets up to put on her coat. Grover gets behind her and hesitates to help her put on her coat; he’s only an inch away, but last minute decides against doing it. He sees her off to the exit, feeling compelled to start with his ‘confession’ which is that “despite [his] most intense efforts, things happen anyway”, stating that he has decided against developing any emotional attachments with anyone in senior year, before graduation, but yet insisting that after the alcohol wears off and Jane and him go back to their daily routine, they both still “feel this way” and hoping they get to “keep this”. One could only hope that what he is referring to is the magic of that particular moment, the unplanned intimacy and unmistakable complicity they have managed to conjure up together leading up to that moment. To this Jane responds with a more sobering answer, putting things into perspective by saying that the whole thing shouldn’t be conceived in such dramatic terms and that they still “have some time” since “it’s a long life”. She takes Grover’s suggestion one step further, hypothesizing about what would happen should they indeed start a love affair and asking him if he thinks the affair would last. Upon Grover’s quick retort (“That’s a nice attitude”), Jane pauses for a while and leaves.

Artistically speaking, Baumbach plays with the notions of the spoken and the unspoken interchangeably which adds to the spontaneous and dynamic character of the scene. Being centered on two people who have found themselves in this amazingly auspicious moment in time, this scene flawlessly captures the ‘will they, won’t they’ conundrum so many of us have found ourselves in.
When Jane leaves the bar the viewer is left with the feeling that just about anything might happen between our two protagonists after their 'moment' is over; out there, ‘in the reality of life', they may have a storybook love affair, or indeed, by some weird twist of faith, may even never see each other again. It is a definite maybe and the dramatic value of the scene is that it so unpretentiously suggests to the viewer that one should always cherish the beauty of the moment and the fullness of the feelings one experiences in that particular moment, in spite of the whirlwind of ill-fated events that may potentially ensue. By having crafted such a flawless cinematic moment, Baumbach inevitably turns the viewer into a cheerleader for Grover and Jane's budding romance, almost to the point of compulsion.

[–] Flora_Poste 8 years ago

I like all of the above about that scene, and some other things, too:

- We finally understand how and why Grover become so attached to Jane. Their beginning is so promising that we can imagine how fun the "Grover/Jane thing" was for him, although we see nothing of their actual relationship except Day 1 and the final day.

- We also understand just how strongly against "things happen[ing]" Grover is, and how hard he fights against letting things happen. Suddenly his long paralysis after Jane's departure for Prague makes sense.

- Finally, in this scene we see the genesis of all Grover's "affectations that have become habits." We realize how strong Jane's influence was on Grover:

1. Grover never entered that townie bar before Day 1 of Grover/Jane. Yet the following year he is still constantly hanging out there, with all his friends. He's still living in her wake.

2. Grover never met Chet before this scene. Chet was Jane's friend (and her one-time boyfriend, according to a part of this scene that didn't make the final cut), but in the year after Jane's departure, Chet looms large in Grover's life as a kind of older/wiser brother.

3. We learn that Grover picked up the habits of drinking Scotch and smoking cigarettes from Jane. He entered that townie bar on Day 1 as a nonsmoker and non-Scotch drinker. After their affair ends, Jane is long gone, and yet Grover keeps sitting in the townie bar that Jane discovered, smoking and drinking the stuff that Jane used to smoke and drink. It's pathetic and hilarious how "stuck" he is.