Nothing and Kicking and Screaming
Nothing and Kicking and Screaming
Dir: Noah Baumbach
Year: 1995
Spine No.: 349
Legally separated. Divorce is too expensive.
- Elliot Gould
I never really realized how from 1980 to around 1996, so many movies about nothing were being made. It starts, like all things, with Empire Strikes Back (80), and that film’s overarching nihilism, and extends through Suburbia (84) and Swingers (96) (yeah, I know that three movies that far apart don’t constitute a movement. BARE WITH ME.) This isn’t the kind of movie about nothing that you saw with Fred Astaire or Michael Bay- films that jump and explode and come at you in 3D, anything to make the viewer forget the lack of substance. These films have characters who just sort of hang out, letting life happen around them. They’re losers, but not in a particularly cool way. They just kind of exist, and cameras are just kind of following them around.
The stakes couldn’t be lower for Kicking and Screaming’s antihero losers, who have all just graduated college. That second part of that sentence sums up the plot. Max, Skippy, Grover and Otis have graduated, but don’t have a clue what to do with their lives after that. Okay, they have a clue, but being sarcastic and trying to sleep with college girls can only get you so far.
Every male character in the film is fantastically shaded and complex. Max’s vicious sarcasm and sense of longing, Grover’s frustrations with writing. Even Eric Stoltz and Elliot Gould’s (in a single scene!) characters show off remarkable complexity. I really can’t emphasize this enough. The four main chararcters are dedicated to nothing, they want to float along a river of wit and sex. Criterion’s cover art nails this feeling perfectly- a series of amusing catchphrases all connected, all leading nowhere.
Take the quote from above, for example. Divorce is something final, a complete removal. Legal separation is distance, just enough to keep things complicated. It’s only a difference in terminology, but symbols and words mean everything to these characters. Even though Grover, Gould’s son, can’t relate to this idea, it describes his relationship with college, with his friends, with everything, perfectly. Baumbach’s male characters are able to understand each other on an almost telepathic level without even realizing it, because they’re too full of shit to look beyond themselves.
HOWEVER, I really want to discuss is the female characters, because this was just a thorn in my hide. Kicking and Screaming starts off with the most intellectual break-up scene this side of The Social Network (2010), with Grover and his girlfriend Jane breaking up over her wanting to move to Prague over Brookyln (a precsient and LOL-worthy conversation to be having in 1995, just a few years after Do The Right Thing). The film makes it clear that they’re both extremely talented, very interesting people. TOO BAD IT NEVER GOES ANYWHERE. Baumbach has this thing where Jane leaves messages on the machine that no one listens to, and I guess that’s symbolic of something, but it felt like a waste of a great character. While the men are Little Boys, the women are Responsible Figures or Sexual Beings. And I guess that’s how a lot of guys this age look at women, but Baumbach should have shot higher. Yes, there is a magnificent claustrophobia in keeping the film in the shitty college town while Europe and New York beckon, but I really don’t think it would have been hurt by seeing what was actually going on in the Czech Republic for like, a minute. But that’s just me.
Kicking and Screaming is a fantastic film, showing every possible angle there is of a very particular subset of people. It could have been better if it expanded its scope the tiniest bit, but it’s got an intensity that will stick with you for as long as your college loans.
