A long time ago we used to be friends, but I haven’t thought of “Veronica Mars” lately at all. I watched every episode of Rob Thomas’s celebrated TV series about a teen private eye addicted to curiosity and obsessed with the class divides. I clapped along with The Dandy Warhols at the beginning of every episode. I vaunted the stellar cast, the sharp writing and the unusually well crafted voice-over narration. I remember loving “Veronica Mars” a lot, but after watching the Veronica Mars movie I realized that the details have faded from memory in favor of a general impression of quality craftsmanship, and I am sad to report that those memories did not come flooding back over the course of the film.
TV series that make the transition from the small screen to the bigger one with the same cast and continuity intact are rare, and tend to suffer from the same problems. The X-Files and Serenity (spun off from the cult hit “Firefly”) were Members Only events that catered to fan service and explorations of subplots that meant the world to the characters within them and nothing to newcomers. Like the others, Veronica Mars delves into characters who have little to do with the story this time around, but who absolutely had to show up because avid viewers love them. Their chemistry remains intact but the context that made their chemistry so fascinating in the first place is relegated to academic exposition about previous episodes.
An awful lot happens in Veronica Mars, but if you haven’t watched the series – and recently – it may be difficult to become invested in the ultimate fate of supporting players like Stosh “Piz” Piznarski (Josh Lowell) and Eli “Weevil” Navarro (Francis Capra), who undergoes not one but two transformations over the course of the film, but whose borderline Shakespearean downfall falls flat when viewing the film as an individual entity.
Not that Veronica Mars wants you to view it as an individual entity. The film embraces its insider status (ironic, given its repeated criticism of the self-involved “09-ers”) and litters its running time with in-jokes, off the cuff references to episodes long past and appearances by characters who were barely important when the series was on the air. Veronica Mars doesn’t play like a feature film – the scale and stakes are simply too small – and instead comes across like a TV movie reunion event; it’s A Very Brady Christmas but with snappier dialogue and murder.
It’s been ten years since Veronica Mars (Kristin Bell) graduated from high school having solved two high-profile homicides and her own life-changing rape. In the years that followed she went to law school, gave up criminal investigation and settled down with college romance Piz, the sort of “safe” love interest that tempts heroines like Veronica until her former bad boy boyfriend Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) comes back into the picture, accused of murdering his pop star girlfriend and suddenly needing legal counsel.
So Veronica Mars leaps back into action, jeopardizing a lucrative new job and an affectionate but dispassionate relationship in favor of her old adrenaline-junkie gig as a private investigator who infuriates the bourgeoisie while defending the underdogs. Of course Logan didn’t do it: that would be like finding out that Fox Mulder was behind the vast government conspiracy all along. But their former classmates may very well be involved, and fortunately for Veronica’s investigation they’re all back in town for the ten year reunion of Neptune High.
Veronica Mars is all about Veronica Mars, and Kristin Bell still has that twinkle of mischievous overconfidence that makes her pettiness against the 1% feel cathartic. Her cold intellect’s inevitable betrayal by her unexpectedly romantic id serves to make her complicated, whereas too many stories would instead give the impression that her strength was just camouflaging the empty space in her life where a man should be.
But the focus on Veronica undermines the mystery she’s trying to uncover: the murder at the center of Veronica Mars is all hearsay, all off-camera, and difficult to care about because we don’t know the people involved – or at least who they’ve evolved into since the series’ cancellation – and how it affects them. It’s just an excuse to bring everyone together, and not a vital component of the story. In most detective movies the mystery is nothing more than MacGuffin, a dramatic justification to explore the rich cast of characters, but the cast is so sprawling and the focus so narrow that we don’t really learn anything about the world of Veronica Mars other than what it’s turned into in writer/director Rob Thomas’s imagination over the course of a decade.
Veronica Mars is the epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows writ long, but writ small. Fans of the series will take pleasure in revisiting the series’ trademark snark but that enthusiasm will diminish after they come to the conclusion that Veronica Mars is little more than a long-awaited Facebook update about what our old friends have been up to, and an uncomfortable conclusion that they were all cooler in high school.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
