KICKING AND SCREAMING

by Kevin Koehler

During one particularly illuminating sequence of Kicking and Screaming, Grover (Josh Hamilton) has to watch as his short story is critiqued in class. “It’s beautifully written,” says someone who will shortly become very close to him. “However, I’ve noticed that characters in Grover’s stories spend all their time discussing the least important things, like what to have for dinner or the best-looking model in the Victoria’s Secret catalog. I see nothing wrong with dealing with the important subject matter.”

Many people level the same accusation against this gem of Gen-X ennui, so easy to underestimate with all the throwaway conversation about Traci Austin, Bud Bowl II, and movies starring monkeys. It’s a little picture, little meaning it has a small budget and no one gets cancer or anything. “I’m a little guy,” says Otis (Carlos Jacott as one of the film’s more memorable characters). “I can’t do all the things the big guys do.” A friend offers a small measure of comfort: “What are you talking about, you’re like a monster, you’re huge.” Don’t underestimate yourself, Otis, for however “little” it may be, Kicking and Screaming is really about the biggest things there are: our dreams in a lonely, chaotic world where we think we know God, only to find He’s not so much dead as just not answering the phone.

At the center of the picture are four college friends for whom graduation is a form of birth trauma; they stare into the real world abyss that awaits (and the abyss most certainly stares back). Grover’s girlfriend Jane (Olivia d’Abo) has ruined his post-commencement plans by joining a writing program in Prague. “How will that work if you’re living with me in Brooklyn?” he asks. “It will be the same, except I’ll be in Prague.” Otis is moving to Milwaukee, where he’ll continue his education and live with his mother. Skippy (Jason Wiles) has no concrete plans other than to read all the great short novels. Chris Eigeman, playing the curmudgeon intellectual he has made an indie film career out of (see: all of Whit Stillman’s pictures), says it best: “Eight hours ago, I was Max Belmont, English major, college senior. Now, I am Max Belmont who does nothing. All of my accomplishments are in the past.” Yes, school has prepared them for nothing, but now they have a thousand ways of expressing it.

Taking a cue from perpetual student Chet (Eric Stoltz as the kind of individual who paraphrases himself), they collectively decide to “postpone that get-started year” by renting a house on campus and continuing to live life much as they had before graduation (but without the grades). The rhythms of college are quickly reinstituted as Otis and Chet start a book club, Max eats at the cafeteria, Skippy audits classes, and Grover hits the campus bars with an eye for “freshman betties” whose sexual congress he hopes will cleanse him of any unresolved feelings about Jane. They all meet where Chet tends bar to rationalize life’s absurdities and prove their intellectual worth with trivia.

Writer/director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) instills in each of his characters juvenile affectations consistent with a desire to climb back in the womb (most notably Otis and his pajama tops worn as formalwear). It’s worth reminding that they all have childish, even pet-like names (Grover has the added bonus of the phonetic “grow” in it); despite superficially “mature” traits like blazer-wearing, cigarette-smoking, and scotch-drinking, they’re unable or unwilling to take care of themselves outside the collegiate cocoon. The world does not run by the rules they know, if it has any rules at all – even their games of trivia have become so contextually incestuous that they are entertaining only to themselves.

The crux of everything is Grover’s deteriorating relationship with Jane, juxtaposed as it is with its genesis. When they make that first connection, it’s strange for Grover to think they’d gone four years on the same campus without meeting, “catching the same colds and being bit by the same mosquitoes.” We like to think of love being a uniquely spiritual entity, a product of fate – that there is a special someone we have to be with. Grover is so grasping for design in his solipsistic existence that he interprets divinity in something as mundane as a flight attendant fidgeting with a model airplane. But as he soon finds out, perhaps these things are instead a product of chance, controlled by circumstance and nothing else; that there is no meaning in things other than the meanings we give them. The love we feel doesn’t necessarily last forever; a deigned future does not exist, no matter how entitled to it we may feel. All that we can be sure of is the moment of now.

How do you make God laugh? begins Chet’s favorite joke. Make a plan.

Interesting footnote: Olivia d’Abo (Jane) is probably known to most as Karen Arnold from the hit television show The Wonder Years. She is also jarringly British, if you’ve ever heard her give an interview. One of her first motion picture performances was in the Bo Derek film Bolero, where she controversially appeared nude. D’Abo herself claims she was born in 1971, which would have made her thirteen at the time of that picture’s release.

© Pretentious Musings. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.