Monday, May 20, 2019

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #218 - Kicking and Screaming (1995, dir. Noah Baumbach)


            Many of the films I’ve written about on this blog I’ve done so because something about it is immediately familiar to me. Perhaps this is why I don’t often choose to write about horror films or sci-fi films or fantasy films. It’s not because I don’t like them, per se (although I am very picky about the ones that I do like), but the movies I tend to hold the dearest are the ones that remind me of people, places or times in my own life. I don’t think that I necessarily set out to do that when choosing films that I want to write about, but I also don’t think that it is entirely unintentional either. Growing up, some of my favorite shit to do was sit around with friends smoking cigarettes, discussing music, art, and pop culture under the influence of some sort of stimulant. So naturally the films that I enjoyed the most back then - those of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino, for instance - tended to be the ones with copious amounts of dialogue. Noah Baumbach’s first film Kicking and Screaming (not to be confused with the Will Ferrell soccer movie of the same name) is just such a film.
            Kicking and Screaming revolves around a group of friends who have just graduated college and, unsure (or rather, terrified) of what lies ahead, decide to hang around the campus an extra year. The main storyline follows Grover (Josh Hamilton) whose girlfriend Jane (Olivia D’Abo) has just dumped him and moved to Prague. Heartbroken, he seeks solace in the company of his best friends Max (Chris Eigeman), Otis (Carlos Jacott) and Skippy (Jason Wiles). The group spends hours at bars and parties, drinking and talking about art, pop culture, and academics and generally avoiding facing their impending futures.
            I’ve tried to turn people onto this movie a lot over the years. I’ve played it for friends and significant others and even tried writing about it in school once or twice. A common talking point that inevitably comes up, whether in conversation or in reviews I’ve read, is that Kicking and Screaming doesn’t really have a plot. On the one hand, there are those who think that this is a detriment to the film, and it can’t be saved by the unique script. Others say that the film’s aimlessness works for it, acting as a symbol for the aimlessness of the characters and that the snappy dialogue just drives it forward. I guess I agree with latter partially, but with one major caveat: I don’t think that the film is plotless at all. I think that the idea of being terrified to face the real world when the only world you’ve ever really known as an adult is your academic pursuits is a very real dilemma. Each and every one of the main characters deals with this problem differently, but the outcome is the same for all. The aforementioned Grover reacts to his girlfriend’s news of her opportunity in Prague not with pride and praise, but with disdain and bitterness. He is angry that she is not going to live with him in Brooklyn as they had planned and, almost in defiance of her success, doesn’t follow through on his own pursuits, opting instead to stick around campus to waste time with his friends where it’s “safe.”
Otis, who in the first scene of the film, we are told “has two moods: testy and antsy,” gets all the way to the airport, headed toward grad school in Milwaukee. Minutes later, he shows back up at their house, announcing that he has deferred his enrollment to the following year. No one tries to stop him or drive him back. In fact, it is glossed over so quickly that it almost seems as though they were expecting it. As we get to know Otis’ character, we realize that he stayed because he is terrified of a world away from the only people who truly know him. No one knows this feeling better than Max, whose tough, wise-ass exterior masks a real vulnerability that often comes out when he is drinking. In one scene, an intoxicated Max looks at himself in the mirror and actually says “you do nothing. Max Belmont does nothing.” It’s such a tender scene I have trouble watching it sometimes. I’ve been in that very situation more times than I can remember. Finally, there’s Skippy, the least mature of the bunch. Skippy’s girlfriend Miami, played by the amazing Parker Posey, has a year left of school before she graduates. So rather than moving on, or even getting a job and waiting for her to finish, Skippy re-enrolls in school, despite having graduated. He is so scared of losing her that he feels re-enrolling is the only way to keep her. At the same time, he uses her as an excuse to do exactly what his friends have all decided to do: stick around and do nothing.
These are four very distinct ways of dealing with the inevitable and I believe that I have employed them all to postpone my own future from time to time. Perhaps that’s what drew me to this film so quickly in the first place. When I first saw Kicking and Screaming, I was a senior in high school, just a few years away from the crossroads at which the characters in the film find themselves. Possibly even closer, considering in my hometown it was not uncommon to skip college after high school and go straight into settling for a shithole career of some sort. And in order to deal with my own self-consciousness or self-doubt, I turned to the only things that made me feel better: my friends. If you’ve ever felt unsure of the future or afraid to take a risk, this just might be a film for you. And hey, at the very least there’s a lot of really funny dialogue.
-         Jonathan Eagle

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