With only three features to his credit, Whit Stillman has one of cinema’s most criminally abbreviated filmographies. The director, an unabashed disciple of Woody Allen, delivered a torrent of talkie, whip-smart comedies of manners in the 1990s, including Barcelona (1994) and Last Days of Disco (1998), only to vanish, seemingly, into thin air. It is his first feature, though, that may be Stillman’s finest, and that film, Metropolitan, turned 20 in 2010.  
         Metropolitan follows the goings-on of a gaggle of preppy Upper East Side 20-somethings on Christmas vacation. The group are perpetually in formal wear, lounging in Park Avenue salons, attending deb parties, and generally living the life of the well-heeled as it existed in post-Reagan Manhattan. They talk about the French social philosopher Charles Fourier and the American literary critic Lionel Trilling. They debate Buñuel and the French children’s book Histoire de Babar. They bemoan the plight of the U.H.B. (an invented acronym for their group, the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie). And yet, Stillman’s film is not some heady meditation, nor is it a high-minded satire of the moneyed class.  It is, rather, nothing less than a freewheeling, populist party movie as enduring and quotable as such pillars of the genre as Dazed and Confused and The Big Lebowski.  
         The U.H.B., ostensibly led by the bratty and relentless Nick Smith (a brilliant Chris Eigeman), inadvertently gains a new member in the film’s opening sequence as Tom Townsend reluctantly shares a cab with the group. It is through Tom, a decidedly unprivileged West Sider, that Stillman introduces the viewer into the world of the U.H.B. Townsend, despite his repeated protestations, accompanies the group to a deb ball afterparty, all the while decrying such functions and insisting that the night’s party will be his last. It isn’t, of course, and as Tom decides the following day not to return his rented tux, but to instead join the group again that evening, the viewer likewise feels that there might be more to the U.H.B. than first we thought.
         That feeling of familiarity is underscored by the character of Audrey Rouget, a pretty-but-plain member of the U.H.B. with a schoolgirl crush on Tom. And it is via Audrey’s timid flirtations with Tom that we start to experience Stillman’s masterful manipulation of tone. When, at that first party, the girls of the U.H.B. admit to Tom that they have read all the love letters he sent to his ex-girlfriend, and U.H.B. member, Serena Slocum, Tom is positively mortified at the thought.  Audrey, however, sheepishly smiles at Tom and says, “Yours were really good. I remember a long letter you wrote Serena about agrarian socialism.” The line is at once sweet and hilarious, and Stillman somehow conveys both the ridiculous and the sincere in that singular instant. Tom later returns the favor, conceding in a playful argument with Audrey about Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park that he hasn’t actually read the book, saying, “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism.”
         Such awkward, stolen moments, of course, are the hallmarks of young love, and, despite all the posh surroundings and bluster about philosophy, politics, and art, Stillman’s is a movie about the young. Sure, the members of the U.H.B. wax poetic on the role of the titled aristocracy in modern society, but they also play strip poker and truth-or-dare, drink until they’re sick, experiment with drugs, and have to answer to Mom and Dad. Most often, though, as young people are wont to do, the girls talk about the boys, and the boys talk about the girls. Charlie likes Audrey. Audrey likes Tom. Tom likes Serena. Serena likes Rick. And so on, and so forth.   
         It is through this instantly familiar and identifiable social vocabulary that Stillman’s movie becomes inherently universal, relatable, and watchable.  Once the director lays plain that his is a story, essentially, about dopey post-grads in love, all of the plays on high and low culture become hilarious window dressing, with each set piece seemingly more uproarious than the last. The hijinks culminate with Tom engaging in a good old-fashioned fistfight for Audrey’s honor with the comically sinister Rick Von Sloneker. Before the fight begins (in what is perhaps the film’s most quotable moment), U.H.B. member Charlie yells desperately to Von Sloneker, “I warn you, he’s a Fourierist!”
         In watching Metropolitan now, one gets the sense that perhaps Stillman knew all along that he was making a lasting, generation-defining film. Throughout the movie, the director inserts dialogue that, heard twenty years on, seems to speak surreptitiously to the import of his own film. When Tom and Nick see a box of Tom’s old toys thrown out on the street, Nick muses that “the childhood of our whole generation is represented here.” Likewise, while Nick is instructing Tom on the type of tux he should buy, Tom interjects, “You’re obviously talking about much more than detached collars,” to which Nick replies wryly, “I am.” Finally, though, it is Audrey Rouget who best sums up the impact and, ultimately, the thesis, of Metropolitan: during one of the group’s many debates about the fate of the bourgeois class, Tom sneers, “Who cares about these people?” Audrey sweetly retorts, “These people are everyone I know.” Indeed they are.