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Though not searching or unusual, the new documentary 'American Teen,' which focuses on a group of students in their senior year at a high school in the little town of Warsaw, Indiana, still hits enough bases to be touching, specific, and familiar.
Burstein worked on the Oscar-nominated documentary 'On the Ropes.' She knows what she's doing, and this stuff is well packaged--a little too much so at first with her jaunty editing in the opening and her cute animations to show the kids' dreams.
The categories seem all too familiar: 'The Jock' (Colin Clemens), 'the Geek' (Jake Tusing), 'the Rebel' (Hannah Baile), 'the Princess' (Megan Krizmanich), and 'the Heartthrob' (Mitch Reinholt). The director picks one of each and sticks with them. But then you realize what she's interested in is how these kids depart from type--while they still buy into the labels.
Thankfully they all break out of their categories--as Burstein expects them too. Colin the Jock almost blows his chances of an athletic scholarship to college. Megan the Princess commits an act of vandalism that takes her down a peg when she's caught, and she's far from a shoe-in to her chosen school (Notre Dame). Besides that, she lives under the shadow of a family tragedy that makes her angry underneath the preening. Seeing himself as a reject and nerd, Jake the Geek suffers many disappointments and rejections--but he's a romantic and in the end he finds love. Perhaps most remarkably of all, for a while at least Mitch, the Heartthrob, happily dates the misfit girl Rebel, Hannah.
The film finds the Rebel and the Geek most interesting in the bunch over all, and focuses on the popular kids most attentively when they become momentarily interesting by messing up.
A warning for anyone outside the Red State American white middle class: don't look for minorities or--outside of sports--standouts at this school or in this movie. Income levels are varied but generally moderate There's nobody gay, or foreign, or handicapped in sight, hardly any black people. There's also nobody markedly brilliant or much interest in what goes on in the classroom. Basketball is a big deal, dating an even bigger one.
The "winners" are the most predictable. Megan is self-centered and bossy. Mitch is cute and has an infectious smile. Jake and Hannah, on the other hand, have a perpetual hard time--and yield the biggest surprises. Jake, who'd actually be cute if he took meds to clear up his acne, articulates the dysfunctionality of his school identity for the camera willingly and clearly (like the boy in Venditti's doc 'Billy the Kid'), and it's not just a self-fulfilling prophesy. Nowadays kids know what a "geek" is, and likewise Megan knows, post-'Heathers' and 'Mean Girls,' what it means to be an Alpha Female. The blurbs for this new movie say it's better than John Hughes or 'The Breakfast Club,' but a lot of how we see these kids and they see themselves grows out of earlier pictures of high school in movies like Hughes'.
Jake may talk in a monotone and feel stuck but he isn't a real outcast--his life is Geekhood lite. He's at least in the school band, he enjoys getting drunk in Mexico with his older brother, and his long search for a girlfriend meets with a reward in the end.
It would be nice if the movie spent a bit less time on the tears and more on the fun times, but it's true, high school is a world of dramas when each day is the end of the world for someone. Hannah's the hardest hit. Her long-time boyfriend dumps her (all such assassinations are now conducted by Text Messaging). It turns out her mother is bi-polar and her father absent and she's essentially raised by her granny. The rejection leads to a depression so severe she can't go back to school for 17 days and she almost loses her chance to graduate.
Hannah has a tough journey ahead of her. But she takes anti-depressants, drags herself back to school, and learns to smile again. In the end she's the only one in Burstein's group who dares to see beyond the horizon. She doesn't just want to be on the winning team or get into Notre Dame. She wants to become a filmmaker and she wants to get out of Indiana. San Francisco State is her goal. Her parents reunite on camera to be surprisingly mean. They won't support her and her mother tries to scare her about being "alone in a big city."
Meanwhile after Hannah comes back to school, Mitch, who's always been attracted to her, starts to date her. Well, a Heartthrob can choose whom he pleases, and Hannah finds him quite charming and fun. Opposites attract: maybe she completes him. They have a little whirl. But when she accompanies him to Megan's house with all the popular kids, it's a disaster. Like the male in Neil LaBute's play 'Fat Pig,' Mitch dumps Hannah because no matter how happy they are together, and they evidently are, peer pressure tells him she won't do. But Hannah survives that and goes to San Francisco planning to work for a year till she becomes a California resident and can hope to pay the fees of SF State. Hannah is a brave and determined soul and a free spirit and for my money, the coolest kid in 'American Teen.'
I'm rooting for Hannah. She could live to make an 'American Teen' of her own--a richer, more comprehensive, less packaged one. Please don't tell me this documentary is funnier than 'Napoleon Dynamite' or wittier than 'Juno.' It's not. And when it comes to dissecting and recombining the categories, it can't beat 'Freaks and Geeks.' But it has one big advantage. These kids are, more or less, taken directly from real life. This is the winning mainstream documentary of the summer of 2008.
score 8/10
Chris Knipp 2 August 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1923113/ |
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28-2-2021 11:11:09