Kicking and Screaming (1995)
The beauty of uncertainty.
Kicking and Screaming tells the story of a group of fresh university graduates who are struggling to figure out what they want to do with their lives after leaving school. Having to become “real” adults petrifies them and the group is all terrified of making massive life-altering decisions but also they’re scared of leaving these decisions too late and being stuck in their perpetual lives of sad drinking and procrastination forever.
This all makes for an entertaining and scarily relatable film that feels like the perfect film for anyone in a similar position in life. Not just university graduates but anyone approaching a transitional period. Each character here feels like a real person and you’d be out of luck trying to find a character you don’t share some characteristics with.
Baumbach perfectly created this nuanced group of individuals who are all dealing with their own separate problems whilst simultaneously going through the same ones together. Everyone is terrified of the idea of what to do next after uni so they all just take the easy route of delaying the choice. They just do it in different ways.
Max copes with it all by being a cynical asshole, who decides to trap himself in the safe but destructive environment he’s in because it’s better than the unknown.
Otis, rather than leaving and starting a career, decides to stay where he is and take a job he doesn’t want at a failing rental store.
Skippy has no clue what to do so he decides to just go back to school and live like Chet, a self-proclaimed “professional student” in his 30s. Skippy doesn’t really want to live like this but he can’t bring himself to change. This life is all he knows. And Grover, who’s kinda the main character, decides to just wallow in self-pity over his ex-girlfriend leaving him, too afraid to move on.
I loved all of these characters and their individual internal conflicts. Seeing them all change and grow as the story went on was enjoyable but also terrifyingly relatable.
This film is about people who don’t have plans. people who don’t know where they’re going in life, and really it’s for those same people. Anyone, especially people pursuing creative careers like Grover, has felt the all-encompassing fear that maybe they won’t make it. That nothing is certain and really the world doesn’t owe you anything.
Maybe you’ll reach your dreams or maybe you’ll be stuck working a job you hate till you retire because you have no other choice. This lack of certainty and control is a very human fear and I think Noah Baumbach weaves it into his film perfectly and it leads to the answer of there being no answer. This film doesn’t have an inspiring ending saying that if you plan or work hard enough you’ll get it but rather it just tells you that you shouldn’t bother worrying and planning about your uncertain future because really you have absolutely zero control. But that’s okay.
This film ends with the main lead moving on and planning to take a risk without a plan. He just spontaneously jumps into the decision to hop on a plane to Prague but Noah Baumbach sticks to the ideology of this film by making him unable to go on the plane, after this long heartfelt speech, all because he doesn’t have his passport. This completely subverts what would happen in most other films and it’s Noah’s way of saying that nothing will work out exactly how you want but that’s okay because like the airport hostess says “you can always go tomorrow” showing that though things don’t always work out how you want, they’ll always be another route.
This main centre theme is most of the draw of this movie for me as it’s a film I needed to see at this current moment in life. I know I want to write films but it’s such an unsteady and uncertain career that I have no idea how I’m going to get there or if I even will get there.
I feel like there’s a massive pressure on young people to make plans. To know what university they want to go to, what career path they’ll take, and how they’re going to get there. And when asked these questions, it’s sometimes hard to say you don’t know because everyone else seemingly has it all figured out and expect the same from you. That’s why seeing a film about people who are even older than me still not necessarily knowing where they’re going but that being okay is such a nice thing to have. It’s nice to relate and know you’re not the only one.
I’ll stop projecting my anxieties onto this film and look it at a bit more critically now. The thing I loved most about Baumbach’s most recent film Marriage Story was the amazing screenwriting and I can say that he still had somewhat great scripts back in 1995. The dialogue in this film is really well done at times but feels ingenuine in others. This film reminds me of some of the criticisms I have of John Green’s books.
Both John Green and Noah Baumbach write really snarky, poetic, and thought-provoking dialogue however the problem with this is that it doesn’t feel real. These characters sometimes feel like characters who were clearly written and not just real, believable people. There are quite a few moments in this film where I was taken out of it because I found myself thinking “Noone actually speaks like that” or this group conversation feels too rehearsed rather than the natural playful battle that is a conversation between a group of friends. Some moments and emotions here were just hard to believe and invest in because of this but I can happily say this is something Baumbach has drastically improved on in the present.
Another problem I had with this film was its visual style, or more specifically its lack of a visual style. This film’s cinematography has no personality and it doesn’t feel like something only Noah Baumbach could have shot, unlike his scripts which feel like something only he can write. This film uses a very small array of camera movements and angles and none of it was very stimulating or added to the story in any way rather than just being a way of showing what’s going on in the script. The editing of this film was also something I disliked, with some of the cuts feeling very jarring and amateur. This is most likely all because of this being Noah’s directorial debut as these are all elements that he has again improved on in his newer films.
Apart from the last couple of criticisms of the film I really enjoyed Kicking and Screaming and thought it was an impressive film and an even more impressive directorial debut. Noah really entered the filmmaking scene with a relatable film of uncertainty and he told this story so well in a way that resonates with audiences even today 25 years later. This is definitely that hidden gem film that you have to see.
