Kicking and Screaming
The Criterion Collection has long been a standard of quality film transfers for home viewing and its commitment to providing behind the scenes knowledge of each film they release. Their release schedule has varied from Akira Kurosawa’s Ran to Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused.
Throughout the nineties numerous films were released about that ever desirable age group, young people, from high school to college. Whereas most films of that decade navigated between the likes of Clueless and American Pie, Noah Baumbach’s Kicking & Screaming sought to highlight the minutiae of the effects of post college graduation, that period of limbo without graduate school to keep one occupied before diving into the real world and searching for a job to pay back loans.
The film centers around four guys dealing with the inability to leave school behind. Grover can’t commit to his girlfriend Jane who takes off to Prague leaving him to troll bars and sleep with freshmen all the while unable to listen to her answering machine messages. Skippy re-enrolls to stay in the vapors of youth and young college girls. Max does next to nothing and falls for his complete opposite, a nearly seventeen year old tough Bronx girl who also works in the college cafeteria. And then there’s Otis, who steals nearly every scene he’s in, with his nebbish solitude and inability to lie or commit to reading the book for the book club he started with Chet, coolly played by Eric Stoltz. Chet is a bartender who’s become a svengali around campus, an intelligent and permanent student who offers wit and wisdom to everyone he encounters.
Baumbach, who garnered praise for last year’s Squid and the Whale, is adept at writing idiosyncratic dialogue and scenes that feel randomly connected or short skits from sketch television. One quick scene has Max placing a handmade sign that reads ‘broken glass’ on a pile rather than merely sweeping it up. Grover’s memories of Jane always begin with sepia toned images of her, dissolving one to another. Their scenes together are slightly neurotic and tense while their attraction bleeds through.
Baumbach delivers in bringing his characters to life through inventive writing and solid casting, using pop culture references not as props but as understandable banter between seemingly realistic people. Although ‘intelligent comedy’ as description is near death for viewership, this film is funny without heading for the crotch. Kicking & Screaming’s humor is derived from real life, the seemingly benign and forgettable situations people live through. The combination of wit and paralysis fuels the narrative to weave a story about young people without patronizing them.
This dvd edition includes commentary, new and old interviews and a short film by Baumbach.
- Brian Tucker
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