Is there anything more torturous than watching a waxwork Steve Martin woo Claire Danes?
By Andrew O’Hehir Oct. 21, 2005 | There were some things I liked about “Shopgirl,” the film adaptation of Steve Martin’s bestselling novella. I write those words with teeth firmly clenched, because it’s basically a dreadful film that should never have been made. Actually, the things I liked can pretty much be summed up as Claire Danes, who brings her appealing, off-balance combination of gawkiness and sexual hunger to the role of Mirabelle, a young artist from Vermont lost in the diluted urban soup of Los Angeles. Mirabelle is deliberately (I guess) presented as an oddball, a young woman in some version of the 21st century who doesn’t seem to watch TV, listen to pop music or own a pair of pants. That might all be fine if “Shopgirl” presented her in some coherent social context, or possessed the aesthetic intensity to forge its own universe and make such questions irrelevant (like, say, this year’s powerful British import “My Summer of Love”). But Mirabelle drifts like a ghost through a
