Kicking and Screaming

There's a lot of angsting and whining in this movie that I didn't relate to when I was an optimistic college student, but now that I too am joining the ranks of the confused and unemployed post-graduate, I look upon its memory more fondly.

Eric Stoltz is very amusing as the eternal student/bartender. A friend of mine is particularly fond of the Otis character, the clown of the film and a master of deflated monosyllabic responses (check the same actor out in Mr. Jealousy - he has wonderful mastery of the trapped upperclass dork). Josh Hamilton does a great job expressing idealized romantic yearning, especially in the last scene of the film, which I won't give away but which is familiarly and achingly bittersweet.

If you're a stickler for realism you might say to yourself, "Yeah right, like these people just graduated from college, they're all in their 30s." If you're the type that can look past the fact that Olivia D'Abo played an 18 year old 10 years ago on The Wonder Years then you'll be OK.

(And if you like Josh Hamilton and Parker Posey, check out House of Yes)

KICKING AND SCREAMING (1995) **** Josh Hamilton, Olivia d' Abo, Chris Eigeman, Parker Posey, Eric Stoltz, Jason Wiles, Carlos Jacott, Cara Buono. To label this the perfect Generation X film so far would do an injustice to this exceptionally brilliant and dead accurate depiction of twentysomethings embarking upon The Real World and grasping futilely to remain in their comfortable existence at college. More like an update of "Diner" with five college pals griping, searching and dealing with their recent shift of reality with some truly biting dialogue and wholly believeable sequences. Written and directed by Noah Baumbach (who has a cameo in the "cow f***er" exchange). Perfect.

"Kicking and Screaming" shows a considerable degree of self-awareness for a film about college graduation directed by a 25-year-old, but it is still an awkward, self-conscious film that is no more confident than its insecure characters.

It was fortunate that in 1995, there were producers out there who believed a movie about depressed upper-middle class white boys had commercial potential, because those producers launched the career of Noah Baumbach, who would go on to make superior films in the next decade. As in his later films, Baumbach seems to take pity on pretentious and tremendously insecure characters while simultaneously taking delight in exposing their weaknesses to the world. But in "Kicking and Screaming," unlike, say, "The Squid and the Whale," Baumbach seems to identify just a little too closely with his young characters and seems to believe that they are less obnoxious than they are.

"Kicking and Screaming"'s greatest strength and weakness is how well it captures an aspect of growing up not often captured on film: the resistance to change. Many films deal with characters who gradually change as they come of age, but "Kicking and Screaming" deals with characters who desire on some level to move on past their current selves but are hesitant to do anything about that desire. This also hurts the film, however, since very little changes from beginning to end, and when characters do change at all, they change less than they (or the film) believe.

The stagnation would not be a problem if the film were a comedy, but, while the film is full of quirky characters and occasionally funny jokes, it deals with the dullness and depression too honestly to really work as a comedy. When wealthy Max, perhaps the most stagnant of all the characters, puts a "broken glass" sign over a pile of shattered glass rather than cleaning it up, it is good for a laugh, but as the film goes on, we get to know Max well enough that it almost stops being funny.

"Kicking and Screaming" is certainly worth seeing for any fans of college-related movies and should probably be required viewing for anyone in their junior or senior years, since it could work as an effective warning against the perils that await graduates without plans. But the film, like its characters, has both too much self-consciousness and too little self-awareness to achieve the levels of comedic or dramatic potential that it hints at.

Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming is one of those rare films that actually gets it right when it comes to understanding the angst of being a young adult right out of college. Baumbach's dialogue matches each of the feelings that newly graduated students go through, but doesn't stoop to the level of condescending. We all identify with the characters of Kicking and Screaming whether it is Skippy and his wanting to further his education because there might be something he missed out on or if Skippy doesn't subconsciously want to become his friends Max, Grover, or Otis. We might identify with Max who blatantly doesn't know what to do now. Max's only hellbent on not looking back on his college years, "I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I'm reminiscing this right now. I can't go to the bar because I've already looked back on it in my memory... and I didn't have a good time." Kicking and Screaming is a film deserving to be recognize as a journey through the minds of graduates and self-discovery of oneself.

"Kicking and Screaming" really depressed me. I'm not sure what I was expecting, having seen only "The Life Aquatic" as an example of notable writer-director Noah Baumbach's work (and of course that film was written with Wes Anderson, and directed by Anderson, so I wasn't sure how much of it was Baumbach's), but nothing I read specifically about "Kicking and Screaming" lead me to expect what I got: one of the most devastating films ever made, and one which while not on par with stuff like "The Graduate" formally, remains one of the very best 'where-is-my-life-going-after-college' movies ever made. It also boasts perhaps the smartest use of flashbacks in a recent American film.

I was thinking this would be sort of like a Wes Anderson film but it's really more what Kevin Smith would have written circa 1994-1997 if his parents were critical thinkers instead of lower-middle-class Catholics, and if he'd been writing about students and recent college grads instead of deadbeats lounging about convenience stores and malls and comics writers involved in bizarre love triangles. Perhaps that's selling this short because as much as I am drawn to some of Smith's work he could never come close to capturing the sort of melancholy Baumbach absolutely nails with this film.

The film isn't really brilliant, mostly because it is really plot-less (which wouldn't be a problem usually but read on) and especially since outside of Eric Stoltz's philosophizing bartender I found nothing particularly interesting about any of the supporting cast. The main emotional pull for me was with Grover (Josh Hamilton) and Jane (Olivia d'Abo)'s story. Jane is pretty much the ideal realization of all the odd, quirky, lovely, bizarre, pretentious, disaffected, writers I had crushes on in university and even before and after that time, and the few I was fortunate enough to date. Ideal really because she's a deeply flawed character. Outside of this core story "Kicking and Screaming" relies primarily on Baumbach's witty banter. The trouble is that I found few of the characters to be all that interesting outside of Grover, Jane, and Chet.

Baumbach's direction initially seems primitive but every so often he surprises with a genuinely sophisticated shot. I assume he got better as he went on and that stuff like "The Squid and the Whale" is entirely sophisticated but he already showed a lot of promise with this film. While again I didn't find the film perfect, I connected so much with Grover and with the place in their lives that all these people are that I found the film genuinely devastating at time. When focusing on Jane and Grover it is absolutely phenomenal, and the final scene, I admit, almost made me cry.