Review: Youth in Revolt

Looking over a few of the Best Films of the Aughts lists, you might notice something sad and startling: virtually no American independent films made the cut. It would appear there was zero new talent to replace all of the promise and excitement of film-makers like Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Gregg Araki, Robert Rodriguez, Steven Soderbergh and Allison Anders who came on the 90s film scene full of piss and vinegar and have since mostly evolved into studio film-makers. During that period a person could go deaf from all the artists moaning about how many of their peers gave into the amorphous threat of "selling out" but the Aughts demonstrated an even bleaker possibility. Plenty of film-makers were happy to neuter themselves far in advance of Daddy Bigbucks even hinting interest.

If you worked in film, read about film or had even a passing interest in film you might have noticed certain recurring themes in the narrative films that became superstars of the festival circuit. In fact, if you were paying any attention at all, you may have at times felt bludgeoned by the ill-conceived repetition: white middle-class American man in his late 20s, can't grow up, can't commit to his lovely girlfriend, hates his parents, still mad about not being popular in high school and can't hold a job. Happily absent any political conscience in one of the darkest periods of our nation's history, these pixie boys were overwhelmed by the combination of their own privilege and total lack of expectations for greatness (or even goodness in most cases). A host of whacky secondary characters (this is where you might see anyone who is old, queer, fat, sexual, poor or not white) would turn up to wax on with poetic, folksy metaphors about the protagonist's desperate plight, he would make a large dramatic gesture towards reconciling all previous wrongs -- top it off with a hip soundtrack and there you have the history of Independent Film-making 2000-2009 in a nutshell.

And in the late Aughts these protagonists managed to regress even further and so began the over-identification with high school age children. These emotionally fragile oracles who were somehow jaded by a world they'd had no interaction with were hyper-articulate, possessed a tightly metered sexuality and a carefully calibrated host eccentricities to substitute for a glaring lack of personality or depth. As if upcoming American film-makers decided en masse if they could just re-write their own biographies they would magically re-awaken as thoughtful, competent human beings making interesting art. In the words of perhaps the Aughts most cherished commentator the LOLCat, FAIL.

 

Which brings us to Miguel Arteta, whose 2000 film Chuck & Buck was a darkly funny precursor to excoriating male bonding films like Old Joy and Humpday but has since faded into the landscape of good television and helming the noble but forgettable Jennifer Aniston vehicle Good Girl.

In his Arteta's latest Youth in Revolt, Michael Cera (who it's hard to believe anyone age-appropriate would ever identify with), plays Nick Twisp another misunderstood child of divorce. His slutty mom (Jean Smart) and his noble eunuch father (Steve Buscemi) share custody bouncing him back and forth between the suburbs of Berkeley and a trailer park in the sticks of Northern California. He falls head over heels with Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday) the girl next door who is (sigh) dating the jerky, but confident Trent. To help him get in touch with his own inner douchebag, Nick creates an alternate personality Francois Dillinger, a delightful French ruffian who makes them good boys go bad. In a misguided attempt to win Sheeni's affection, Nick sets fire to a restaurant which results in her getting shipped off to a French-language boarding school a few hundred miles away and him hiding out in his mom's trailer with her increasingly repulsive line-up of boyfriends.

It's telling that Francois Dillinger's every scene is riffed in Youth in Revolt's trailer. Dillinger represents both the film's sole source of levity (the first third is so leaden and self-serious I wasn't even sure if the film is a comedy) but also its greatest failings. Teenagers of the 21st century have so much access pop culture history there truly is a seemingly endless fluidity of personality and representation. Even a meathead could do a google search Serge Gainsbourg and get what Nick Twisp was going for in the time it takes to read a Wikipedia entry and look at a YouTube video. But instead of having any fun with what actual teenagers' lives are about, Arteta is obsessed with keep the film totally airless and mired in unremembered nostalgia (really, tan corduroy pants again? When will this cruel, sartorial hell Wes Anderson hath wrought finally end?)

Hopefully, Youth In Revolt represents a bookend to this unfortunate chapter of cinema history. I doubt it will, but just in case.. a note to artists everywhere, now in their 30s (or worse) and still desperately trying to re-write their failed pubescent period: You're a tyrant to your preciousness. Your peers clearly made the right choice in shunning you because you're insufferable and boring. Please, if not for the sake of art then for your own well-being, just stop.



CC: Rian Johnson, Zach Braff, Jared Hess, Seth Gordon, Diablo Cody, Jesse Eisenberg.

Comments

[Erin D.]

As a producer, I'm extremely sympathetic to the issue. But you're right, the film makes Berkeley and rural NorCal both look like Oklahoma.

[Craig Phillips]

Did it bug you that even though it's set in NorCal (like the book), he shot it in like the Midwest and South? Presumably because it was cheaper, of course, but still, that kind of bugs me (admittedly I haven't seen it yet)... Yep, Michigan looks just like Berkeley!

[Erin D.]

Johnson's in there more for Brothers Bloom than Brick.

[Sarah]

I think you're mildly unfair to cc Rian Johnson. But otherwise, yes.

[Candice Frederick]

interesting. i couldn't tell which way this movie was going based on the commercial. but it may be fun if anything!