September 9, 2010: Kicking and Screaming
I wanted to like Kicking and Screaming. I really did. Having been quite a fan of Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005), and having appreciated the underlying message behind this year’s Greenberg, I thought I’d go back to the beginning, in the spirit of my recent journeys into cinematic pasts, and watch Kicking and Screaming (1995). Baumbach’s feature directorial debut, it’s about a group of recent college graduates and how they got to be the way they are.
I admittedly need to fall back on my half-assed escape here, since I clearly wasn’t paying full attention to the film. I don’t recall what I was doing at the time, but it obviously impaired my ability to follow what was going on. About 15 minutes in, I got confused about timelines, but it wasn’t until about 3/4 of the way through the film that I realized it was definitely going backwards. After the opening scene at a graduation party, the film worked its way back through the years this group had spent in college, and how the friendships and relationships developed. Now, even knowing that, I don’t think I would have been too keen on the film, for a number of reasons. First of all, it was a little Americentric for my taste, with foreign travel being very stereotypically presented as a standard way to expand horizons, held up as an indicator of how much someone knew about the world. Second, and I can’t necessarily fault the film for this, it depicted the classic US college lifestyle of deep heart-to-heart connections and revolving-door romantic relationships and long-lasting friendships peppered with occasional huge emotional blow-ups, which was not at all my university experience and therefore goes a long way towards destroying the realism of the film for me. Third, while there is lots of natural conversation among the characters, admirably more “real” than in a lot of movies, at the same time it falls victim to being unfortunately not all that interesting.
I didn’t know about Kicking and Screaming at the time of its release, though to be fair it was during a time when angst-ridden youth films were a dime a dozen, with Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) having helped to electrify the genre and Reality Bites (1994) having taken it to a commercial high. My generation (keep in mind that I was the right age for all of these films to have resonated with me, if I had seen anything of my own experience in them) only knows The Knack’s “My Sharona” as the song playing while Janeane Garofalo dances like a crazy person. I can see the merits of Kicking and Screaming, but I guess I didn’t pick the right time or occasion to give it a shot.
Innovative but I didn’t pay attention.
Post a Comment