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So what’s wrong with Rebel Without A Cause? First off, I have to provide a little subjective perspective. I hate Method acting. I cannot stand it. Method acting, wherein the actor burrows themselves completely in the character they’re playing, can work (see most of Daniel Day-Lewis’s filmography for proof), but only when the actor following this style isn’t equating Method acting with mumbling. Marlon Brando would fall into this trap sometimes, and James Dean is guilty of it here. He plays Jim Stark, a troubled 17-year-old who’s just moved to Los Angeles. As the movie opens, Jim is taken into the local police station for public drunkenness. While there, he meets the other two leads of the film, dealing with their own parental problems.

There’s Judy (the luminous yet shrill Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo). Judy is 16, and looks a bit older; her dad is thrown off by his daughter turning into a woman and is no longer affectionate to her. Plato has the worst problems of all: his parents are never around, but rich enough to fob him off on their maid, who does her best without being a maternal figure. Oh, and he’s a closeted homosexual. Seeing as this film came out during the era of the Hayes Code, of course, the film’s writer-director, Nicholas Ray, can’t tell us this directly. No, we figure this out through such subtle hints as Plato having an address book with only male names, always looking longingly at Jim, and having a bedroom made of pink. Yes, this is not a movie whose themes are going to sneak up on you.

Over the period of about 36 hours, Jim, Judy, and Plato will all become very close friends, but also suffer great tragedy that will aid them in being very filled with misplaced, pointless angst. Again, I want to point this out: I’m 25, so if I come off here sounding like an old man grumbling about those damned kids on his lawn, it’s not my age. But these kids are some of the whiniest teenagers I’ve ever seen. Jim complains that his parents don’t understand him and that his dad will say one thing, but his mother will contradict it. Well, how about that, Jimbo? You’re a human being. Get over it. What’s more baffling is how his parents act as the film progresses, and how their actions are divorced from any kind of reality. Then again, maybe I’m wrong; however, if your son witnessed a murder and could be considered some kind of inadvertent accomplice, would you encourage him to lie for no reason?

No. Of course you wouldn’t, because real people don’t do that, unless they are cursed with the stupidest genes ever. But reality and this movie don’t go together. Another example: as Jim and Judy walk to school, comparing notes about how his parents suck, but hers suck more, Jim asks her, “How do you live?” Judy responds, seriously, by looking in the distance and saying, “Who lives?” I’m not saying that this dialogue is terrible (though Wood’s delivery is pretty wooden), but I don’t think any teenager from 1955 or from 2010, or any other time in between, would talk like that. I was a teenager, and I never talked like that. Why? Because I knew that talking like I was a character in a bad movie was a fast trip to an ass-whooping. And unfortunately for me, the people in Rebel Without A Cause who do the ass-whooping are just as unrealistic.

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