Sole Criterion: Kicking and Screaming
by Brett Ballard-Beach
December 22, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Beginning with the release of Citizen Kane on laserdisc in 1984 - and along the way pioneering the advent of widescreen formats, scene-specific and feature-length commentary, and the idea of a "special edition" release of a film for the home video market - The Criterion Collection has released somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand films over the last four decades. This output covers everything from the excess of ‘90s Bruckheimer-produced American blockbusters (Armageddon) to the pioneering efforts of the French New Wave (The 400 Blows) and from the existentialism of ‘70s car culture films (Two Lane Blacktop) to insightful and in-depth omnibus collections of films by directors ranging from Fassbinder to Merchant Ivory to Akerman to Rohmer. From the profane (Flesh for Frankenstein, The Night Porter) to the sacred (The Passion of Joan of Arc) to the sacredly profane (Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom), these films are as good a place as any in this culturally fragmented world to gain some initial exposure to the gamut of styles, nationalities, genres, and epochs that have defined the first century plus of filmmaking.
Considering that I have only seen a small fraction of these films to begin with, and most of those on the commercial/accessible side of things, I hope to use this new column to be as much of a learning experience for myself as anyone else who would care to follow along. By plunging into films I know next to nothing about, I hope to create fresh ideas and thoughts in my mind, and then couple that with some background information and context. It’s exhilarating, but also a little scary. Before I go jumping into structuralist feminist classics (Jeanne Dielman) or uncategorizable American avant garde (Schizopolis), I will take some baby steps with my initial columns, focusing on a pair of films by the writing team of 2004’s clever sea jaunty The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and 2009’s delightful animated romp Fantastic Mr. Fox (not a Criterion but much recommended).
In 1995, Noah Baumbach released his debut film as a writer/director - Kicking and Screaming. It came and went with at least a little fanfare, opening at the New York Film Festival and thrusting the 20-something neophyte in to the spotlight. But it received only very limited release, playing in barely 25 screens and earning not quite a million dollars. I have big and small picture takes on how the film, through no fault of its own, got swallowed up and misunderstood in its time, and why it has taken 15-odd years and Baumbach’s subsequent films to put it into perspective, for the minor, but pitch-perfect modern classic that it is.
Arriving on the heels of Tarantino’s rise to movie geek godhead status with Pulp Fiction (which, like Kicking and Screaming, features Eric Stoltz in a key supporting role) and coming not long after Whit Stillman’s droll “Americans abroad” tale Barcelona (which also features actor Chris Eigeman), Baumbach was conveniently categorized as some sort of cross between the two auteurs, albeit with about 99% less violence. While his characters are as in love with repartee, banter, and a clever putdown as the other two filmmakers, Baumbach is less concerned with highly detailed plot logistics, and more in tune with a story that meanders or drifts aimlessly, a fitting approach for a film about the various paralyses (emotional, psychic, romantic) facing a quartet of recently commenced undergraduates. In its marketing, poster art, etc. not much effort was expanded by distributor Trimark Pictures to make it look much different from other mid-'90s Generation X indie romantic comedies also featuring Stoltz, or Eigeman, or the ubiquitous Parker Posey. Thus, it was cursed with appearing to be both a trend jumper and fairly indistinguishable from others of its ilk.
When I sat down in for my initial viewing of the film, during its too brief first run in Portland, I was less than a year away from graduating college myself. That fact, coupled with my own romantic failings, and the myriad ways in which Grover, Otis, Max, and Skippy reminded me EXACTLY of myself and my small group of classmates/friends, made the film painfully uncomfortable to watch during some moments, and then seemingly cliché during others. It captured its time very well, but those are precisely the sorts of films that never age well, ironically because they lose the ability to seem timeless. But there were deeper currents to navigate and it is those melancholic waters to which I have returned on probably a dozen occasions since, making it one of the few films I have seen more than two handfuls of times.
Although Baumbach has shown no qualms about pinning his characters/specimens like butterflies to the wall in the emotionally up heaved landscapes of The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, and Greenberg, he also has an affection for the trope of a lovable band of insiders/outsiders who together operate as a not entirely dysfunctional unit, as evidenced in his collaborations with Wes Anderson, and, though it feels odd to type these words, in his solely credited screenplay for the upcoming Madagascar sequel, Europe’s Most Wanted. The men of Kicking and Screaming may act like jackasses on occasion, but none of them are irredeemable and Baumbach seems to regard them with equal measures affection, skepticism, and critique. A warm empathy is prevalent, as is the notion that all hope is not lost.
Kicking and Screaming is not a romantic comedy, at least, not entirely, but for the entangled couple at the heart of the story, whose romance we see on its last legs as the film opens, Baumbach lucked out with actors who possessed the same sort of ineffable je ne sais quoi that popped when Ethan Hawke meshed with Julie Delpy in that same year’s Before Sunrise. It’s not easy to encapsulate precisely what makes the chemistry of Josh Hamilton and Olivia D’Abo - who play Grover and Jane - elicit such rapturous praise. They have maybe 15-20 minutes of scenes together and nothing remotely physical takes place between them.
Baumbach shoots/presents five of their six shared scenes together as flashbacks, parsed out at regular intervals throughout the film’s 96 minute running time and sharing a stylistic refrain: each starts out as a black and white freeze-frame of Jane, which then haltingly, hesitatingly comes to life (reminding me of the single frame of motion in Chris Marker’s 1962 sci-fi romance La Jette) before switching to color and normal speed. Accompanied by Phil Marshall’s spare, melancholic but somehow catchy acoustic guitar score, these moments take the film outside of itself hinting at a more serious sense of loss to accompany what one of the main characters jokingly refers to as his “nostalgia for conversations I had yesterday.”
One of the strengths of Baumbach’s screenplay (from a story he co-wrote) is that incidental characters are allowed to make their mark even if they only appear for a scene or two, never to return. From the random dudes sitting outside their dorm debating whether it’s preferable to be a cowfucker or to have lost one’s mother, to Amy, the freshman Grover goes home with as one of his post-Jane rebounds, there are no small roles, just a rich vein of observational (and occasionally absurdist) humor.
Even though this is a "dude" film that in some ways might be considered the '90s prologue to the rise of the bromantic comedy in the last decade, the females in the film, though they may inhabit the stereotypical role of the girlfriend or love interest, are all given fleshed out parts, and the actresses - D’Abo, Parker Posey, Cara Buono, Perrey Reeves, even a blink and you’ll miss her Marisa Rabisi - are allowed to be quirky and human instead of unattainable ideals. (This is apparent even in an offhand moment, such as Amy’s sweater getting briefly stuck over her head as she attempts to strike a seductive pose on Grover in her dorm room.) Time and again, it is also the ladies who accurately call bullshit on the men’s “circle jerk” of pop culture driven conversations, manufactured crises, and refusal to pick themselves up out of the rut they have fallen in to.
I also enjoyed Elliot Gould’s extended cameo as Grover’s dad when I was younger, but now as I myself am in fatherhood, I look at his performance with new appreciation for the emotions he casts on his relatively reined in face, regaling his horrified son with stories about how hard it is for him as a divorcee at 56, dealing with the dating scene, and using condoms once again. Gould is about the only other adult in sight and even though the film is sympathetic to his plight, there is a hint of a messy divorce just off-screen, one tinged with the echoes of the real-life dissolution of Baumbach’s parents’ marriage, which he also mined for far more brutal laughs in The Squid and the Whale.
But the heart of the film is in its dialogue, in the way, familiar to many a collegiate, that words are used both as an expression of superiority and/or self-ridicule, and more importantly, are used to keep the impending adult world at bay just a little while longer. I could pull any two minute sequence at random that would showcase Baumbach’s ability to deftly blend high laughs with low laughs and yet always find a rueful truth hidden just underneath or off to the sides of the laughs. Chet (Stoltz) the eternal graduate student and preferred bartender/father figure/sage to the quartet of grads has found a way to turn his never-ending pursuit of his Ph.D. in to a full-time profession. But even he acknowledges that such a path “is not for everyone.” And Kicking and Screaming traces the alternate path that Skippy, Otis, Max, and Grover must take outside of their ivy-colored walls.
For Grover, this culminates in an achingly beautiful monologue addressed by him towards an airline ticket agent as he passionately, awkwardly and emphatically explains why she must find an empty seat for him on the shuttle flight that will help get him on his way to Prague to reunite with Jane. Baumbach cuts to the agent (Jessica Hecht, Ross’ ex-wife on Friends) only twice during the exchange but each time the cut is perfect, finding first her disbelief at Grover’s outpouring, and then the most perfect of conspiratorial smiles as she resolves to help him. The wistful punchline to the scene (which I will not spoil for those unfamiliar with the film) is both an appropriately ironic kicker and completely in keeping with what the audience has observed about Grover throughout the film.
Baumbach also ends the film with a perfect edit and cut to black, one that always catches me off guard, out of the final Grover/Jane flashback scene (the film ends amusingly, in slightly flustered silence) and in to Freedy Johnston’s gorgeous 1994 pop song “Bad Reputation” off his aching and romantic LP, This Perfect World, from the same year. Johnston’s song, which also employs nimble wordplay in the service of a tale of lost love, may be one of the most exquisite pairings of film closing credit song that I can think of.
Watching Kicking and Screaming nowadays can still dredge up feelings akin to the ones inspired by those dreams (that I still occasionally have) where it’s the end of the semester and you only now realize you haven’t attended any of your classes. With his first film Baumbach aimed for a “so funny it hurts” approach (which has since shaded over in to the similar but even more unsettling “so painful you have to laugh” modus operandi in his latter-day films) that keeps its emotional honesty relevant even after its pop culture references have long passed their expiration date. Like many films before it, the disappointments with what Kicking and Screaming wasn’t had to have time to burn off and fade away, so that appreciation for what it was could be allowed to take hold.
Next time: Not everyone has a voice that is appropriate for voiceover narration. Alec Baldwin has a voice that was made to provide narration. DVD Spine # 157