These lines come fast, almost relentlessly, at an unrealistic and thrilling clip. They remind you -- in the gut, where laughter originates -- of what language is capable.
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Walking out of a theater, with this English knocking around your head like a pinball, it's hard to go back to the dull, corporate jargon of the office, or the like-like-like self-centered conversation you hear in any bar or coffee shop.
Words are more than tools for communication. Strung together just so, as Donald Ogden Stewart has demonstrated with this script, words achieve a cumulative effect greater than their meanings.
Dialogue alone can be catchy like a pop song and reverberate like poetry. This script, and the way the actors savor the words or shoot them, demonstrate an understanding of the capability of language to be renewed.
This is not a call to return to good old American English from any past era.
But this movie did remind me that English can be renewed! With energy and wit and speed, not just with acronyms and clever names for unhealthy online behaviors. Thank you, Hepburn and Stewart and co.
P.S. of course there are people in America renewing English right now and who have been since 1940. This movie was just a good jolt to do it and go looking for it.
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This is not a call to return to good old American English from any past era.