The best way to describe Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist – a movie messy and sad and hilarious and wonderful – is to compare it to a piece of chewing gum. “What?” you say. Please, just hear me out.
Nick & Norah opens with Nick (played by Michael Cera from Juno) taking a personal day off from high school. He is mourning his recent breakup and we first see him leaving her a long, pleading “please come back to me” cell phone message – one that is auto-deleted upon completion. Our hearts break as we see pictures from their happy times plastered all over his bedroom wall.
We next meet Norah – along with Nick’s ex Tris and Caroline – in the high school corridors. As played by Kat Dennings, we know immediately that Norah and Nick will find each other. It’s in the urgent way she digs his mix CD out of the garbage, just discarded by Tris. But, more importantly, we can’t wait to see them together. Dennings has created a character as fun and lovely and quirky as Ellen Page did in Juno – Cera has been very lucky with his leading young ladies.
Nick & Norah also stars a piece of chewing gum. It belongs to Caroline and we first meet it being stretched between her mouth and that of some stranger she has just met in a nightclub in a drunken bliss. That gum is given a great deal of screen time for something usually just a bit player. Here it is stretched the way Nick will be pulled between Norah and Tris throughout the movie.
Continuously, that chewing gum is portrayed as Caroline’s best friend. She can’t imagine parting with it and the ways she finds to keep it safe while her mouth is otherwise preoccupied form a running joke. She adores that piece of gum and won’t let go even though it has long since lost its flavor, similar to Nick’s reluctance to let Tris go.
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