Let's see if I remember how this is done.
Metropolitan vs. Serial Mom
Metropolitan
Major Flaws
I found a lot of the acting to be unconvincing. I'm not saying it's unrefined or even necessarily poor, but unconvincing. Really this is the main flaw in the film seen though many lenses: it's often unconvincing. I don't know that I every felt the "truth" for the characters in the plot. The pacing, while appropriate, fails to really execute. For a film like this, that has obvious dramatic aspirations of some kind, it relied entirely too heavily on wit in dialogue to survive.
Major Attributes
It is actually pretty funny. Not really funny, but pretty funny. Also, I have a soft spot for Chris Eigeman. There's something to be said, as well, for this film's place in the popular consciousness. It's part of the new style of the comedy of manners. It also exerts a lot of influence on filmmakers that look satirically at the rich. Besides all that, this is basically the template for any recent comedy scene based on high intellectual conversations that become the butt of the joke. I also was very intrigued by the staging and composition in the after-party scenes. The characters are often captured as a whole, roomful of people even when only one person is talking and not everyone is focused on them. It helped to reinforce the idea of the focus of a party, the relative isolation possible despite the cramped accommodations of these such parties and the general strange, uncomfortable artificiality of the whole superficial, banal endeavor. The only problem with all this is that they did not take this effort near far enough for me. While sometimes collapsing in on a segment of the party that is focused on a particular topic/speaker, they often revert to close-ups and shot/reverse in a fairly conventional manner that fails to reinforce the possible goals of the cinematography.
Serial Mom
Major Flaws
Maybe its aspirations? This is a film very much in the Waters style, at a time where he was in the continuous process of reigning in the shock and only using it where it really makes sense. It doesn't really explore itself aesthetically and falls almost entirely into either film conventions or Waters conventions.
Major Attributes
Weren't those half-assed flaws? This film falls right into Waters' thesis of the satire of the grotesque. It's a film right in his wheelhouse and he kills it (in the best possible way). It was really funny all the way through. The satire hit you over the head when he overtly wanted it to and it was more subtle when it was designed to be. It was dead on in either style. The camp was hitting all the right notes as well. The entire cast was great, especially Kathleen Turner and Sam Waterson. It was effortless and wonderful. He didn't need any flourishes, fancy editing, or evocative lighting because he did everything he wanted to by making a film the way he always has. Did I mention how funny I found it?
So, I found this tough because the styles were really different and the intentions were more so. However, when you weigh the success that the filmmakers had in hitting their goals, it's no contest. Metropolitan is too timid and it fails repeatedly at what it tries to do, while Serial Mom never does.
Serial Mom's reign of terror continues as it brutally murders Whit Stillman's film with a pot roast!