The movie is kinda brilliant.

Clerks (1994)

One of the problems with many films made about young people in the ‘90s is that screenwriters tried so hard to make their characters hip.  Think about Reality Bites, a movie that sank under the weight of forced injection of pop culture references into every scene and the characters’ boring, drawn-out examinations of their lives.

And then consider Clerks, a welcome reaction to phony movies like Reality Bites.  With its biting dialogue and true-to-life feel, you might actually want to spend a few hours discussing girls and Star Wars trivia with Clerks’ characters.

Kevin Smith’s first picture, shot in black-and-white on a $28,000 budget, looks at Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson), two slackers who work in adjoining retail stores in Jersey.  Dante mans the register in a QuikStop market, while Randall runs a failing video store right next door.  Stuck in dead-end jobs, the college dropouts spend their days discussing Return of the Jedi, stupid customers and fetish pornography with the same fervor as PhD candidates discussing their research.

Dante’s day begins on a low note when he’s called in on his day off.  His arrival is met with nothing but trouble. There’s gum jammed in the store‘s locks.  A man with a cancerous lung stashed in his briefcase enters the store and instigates a riot among smokers who frequent the QuikStop.  Two stoners, Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith) stand outside the store dealing pot and chasing away customers.

And throughout the day, Randal nags Dante endlessly and regales patrons with tales of ever-increasing crudeness.

To top things off, Dante is having a romantic crisis, trying to choose between his wonderfully accommodating girlfriend Veronica and his ex-flame, Caitlin, who’s just arrived back in town.  The worst thing, Dante complains: “I’m not even supposed to be here today!”

It might sound like a clusterfuck on paper.  But I assure you the film is anything but–I can only remember maybe five or six movies I’ve ever seen where I laughed as hard as I did during my first (and second, and third…) viewing of Clerks.

Perhaps I liked the movie so much because of Randal, one of the most original characters to hit the screen in the 1990s.  If Dante plays the straight-man who tries to care about his job, Randal relishes the opportunity to fail.

It’s hard to tell if he intentionally wants to irritate his clients or if he’s totally oblivious to the fact that, in a retail job, he must at least try to maintain a veneer of professionalism.  In the movie’s most hilarious sequence, Randal orders “adult” tapes (e.g. “Cum On Eileen”) by telephone right in front of a woman and her pre-school aged daughter so casually, he seems not to understand his actions are in poor taste.

We don‘t blame Randal, though.  His video store is so pathetic that, when he wants to rent a good movie (a chicks-with-dicks porno, in this case), he has to drive three towns over to find it.  And both he and Dante are so underpaid, it’s a wonder they even bother getting up in the morning.  The only explanation I can drum up is that Randal and Dante, with all their angst, grudgingly enjoy their lives and the time they spend together.

And maybe that’s what’s so wonderful about Clerks: the bizarre friendship the guys share.  Unlike Reality Bites’ characters, Randal and Dante don’t seem to have given the slightest thought to what generation they’re part of or how they should “act” to show disaffection.  They just exist, discussing minutia 23-year old dudes typically discuss.

The movie also works because Randal and Dante have a surprisingly astute understanding of human behavior from watching it day-to-day behind the registers of their respective stores.  For example, when Dante and his lady-friend Veronica sit on the floor behind the counter chatting, he leaves some change on the counter accompanied by a sign that reads: “Take correct change.  Be honest.”  His supposition: “Theoretically, people see money on the counter, and no one around, they think they’re being watched.” So true.

Yet, most of their time is monopolized by conversing about how much smarter they are than the average customer.

“You’d never believe the barrage of stupid questions I get at the video store,” Randal comments slack-jawed at one point.  His proclamation leads into a montage where people make the dimmest possible inquiries about movies, culminating with: “Do you have the one with that guy who was in that movie that was out last year?”

Though Clerks has numerous long stretches of dialogue that occasionally sound overly literate (think “Gilmore Girls” set in a 7-11), a few wonderfully zany gags break up the pic‘s sometime-staginess.

In one of the movie’s funniest scenes, a man shopping in the store performs strange endurance tests on eggs and smashes them on a glass freezer door when they don‘t meet his expectations.  I laughed hardest when I realized that Dante and Randal had no intentions of stopping the guy.  They simply look on in wonder, curiously discussing what makes the guy tick.

Of course, beneath all of Dante’s criticism of his customers and analyses of guys breaking eggs on freezer doors, he refuses to seriously consider his own shortcomings.  He inexplicably pines for his cheating ex Caitlin even though his current girlfriend Veronica brings him lasagna at work to make his day just a bit more manageable.

To Dante, however, everything harkens back to his motto that ‘he’s not even supposed to be’ at work that day.  When things go wrong, he always blames it on something supernatural.

When Randal finally calls him on this one major weakness near the end, the situation rapidly escalates into a haphazard destruction of the convenience store‘s candy shelves.  It’s just another way Clerks takes a normal quarter-life crisis moment and makes it actually worth watching.

The premise of the movie is so simple that I can’t begin to imagine how hard it was for Smith to put on paper.  Besides the extraordinarily colorful dialogue, even minor characters like Jay and Silent Bob are worth our attention.  And Veronica, who might be a throwaway girlfriend in a lesser pic, is a serious player and earns our affection in just a few well-scripted scenes.

Smith seems to fully understand that audiences are more interested in hanging out with a slacker who sells coffee and newspapers than most boring movie cops and lawyers.  But then again, very few screenwriters have as good an ear as for the way bored-stiff working people talk.  That’s why Clerks works and is a masterful, unique picture.

Grade: A

Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern star as Jake and Kristy Briggs, a couple of recent college graduates with minimal career aspirations and undying love for one another.  For the first few minutes, Kevin Bacon gives an extremely boring voiceover chronicling his life from meeting his fiance until college graduation.

After faking a resume, he interviews with a Leo Burnett-like Chicago advertising agency, and in one of the film‘s few funny scenes, executives played by Paul Gleason and Dennis Dugan grill him and quickly offer him work as a copywriter.

She’s Having A Baby follows a totally predictable sequence from this point forward.  Like all moderately creative movie characters, Jake dreams of one day quitting his day job in the corporate world and writing a groundbreaking novel.  Eventually, though, the couple is mired in a firmly middle-class lifestyle.  Jake and Kristy buy a three-bedroom house in a small suburban development that is chock-full of neighbors who seem to be quirky, but are really just drab.

Based on the descriptive title, you can guess that, after one of those ridiculous dinner table conversation with both Jake’s and Kristy’s parents, she’ll become pregnant, they’ll struggle through the pregnancy and she’ll have a baby.  Jake’s friend from college (Alec Baldwin, hilariously charming as always) will keep showing up only to give his friend useless advice and make a pass at his wife.  Jake’s novel, even if it is a piece of shit, will eventually be published.  We’ve seen it all before, done better.

The hugest problems with She’s Having A Baby are its clunky pacing and staggering lack of originality.  Where movies like The Breakfast Club might have fallen off in the final frames, there was still a wonderful momentum to the conversation.  Even in Ferris Bueller, Cameron and Ferris were funny and at least halfway interesting (not to mention fun).  In this movie, there are a few amusing exchanges, but they hardly show insight (example: suburban husbands argue over which types of lawn mowers are most reliable).  Kevin Bacon’s narration throughout the movie is likewise unnecessary.

Instead of actually writing a literate screenplay, Hughes chooses to inundate the movie with cornball sight gags, which work about half of the time.  A good one involves a goofy song-and-dance number centering on–you guessed it–lawn mowers.  And there is a laugh-out-loud scene during Jake and Kristy’s wedding early on and an inspired coupling of “Working on the Chain Gang” with a sex scene.

The rest of the gags are comparatively weak, seeming to be minor daydreams in the life of an average 20-something executive.  Immediately after these fantasies run their course, Hughes thrusts us into the movie’s next predictable plot development.  And the movie just keeps chugging along like that: plot development, daydream, plot development, daydream.

Yet, as we’re bombarded with one banal joke after another concerning birth control and impotence, we’re only yearning for the spontaneity and hilarity of Long Duk Dong’s fall from the top of a sycamore in Sixteen Candles.  Even if some of the pratfalls in She’s Having A Baby are good, they still feel drained of the originality evident in most of Hughes’ other pictures.

In the closing sequence, Hughes abandons all intentions of rom-com and chooses to chronicle a weepy melodrama where the birth of the couple’s child looks like it might not go smoothly.  While Jake has corny flashbacks to all of the good times he and his wife shared, you can cue up the gratuitous ’80s easy-listening tunes.

To cherry-top the whole thing, Jake, still the aspiring writer, muses: “And in the end, I realized that I took more than I gave, I was trusted more than I trusted, and I was loved more than I loved. And what I was looking for was not to be found but to be made.”

This ridiculous quote from his obviously soon-to-be-published novel shows us why good movies about writing hardly ever get made.  It’s tough to make writing exciting in a film and becomes nearly impossible when we realize that the main character isn’t a very good writer.

Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern, when in the right roles, are exceptional actors.  Perhaps you’ll remember one of McGovern’s best and most touching performances in Ordinary People, or Kevin Bacon’s turn as the hilarious but irresponsible Fenwick in Diner.  However, in She’s Having a Baby, Bacon’s fully wrong.  Though not without charm, Bacon is simply too mischievous to be playing a suburban husband.  In later years, films like Mystic River and A Few Good Men would show that he had dramatic chops, but in 1988, Bacon was too much of a give-a-shit, humorous actor to play a self-serious yuppie.  And while McGovern is well-cast, she’s given little of substance to say.  The rest of the players in the film simply provide stock background characters with only Gleason and Baldwin giving us mildly memorable supporting turns.

While watching She’s Having A Baby, I was endlessly reminded of how hard I laughed during Sixteen Candles and how much I sympathized with the characters in The Breakfast Club.  That made the experience of watching this film all the more depressing.  Renowned sociologists could study characters like John Bender, Ferris Bueller and Samantha Baker.  They carried entire pictures.  Jake and Kristy Briggs might be more successful at getting a 21-minute TV pilot off the ground.

That how I feel about David Lean’s movie, and my stray thoughts present two problems.  First, the film is a simple love story stretched into an unbearable running length.  And secondly, I was thinking about an episode of “Seinfeld” for about the last hour of the picture when I should’ve been wrapped up in the action.  Not a strong vote of confidence.

Set in small-town Ireland in 1916, just months before the revolution, Lean’s three-and-a-half hour saga is one of the best filmed pictures I’ve ever seen.  But because it chronicles nothing of great importance–a passionless marriage, infidelity, some political events that’re of absolutely no significance to the film’s outcome–watching Ryan’s Daughter is mostly better viewed with the mute button pressed.

The Plot Points:  Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles) is at about that age when good young girls get married.  The men in her life all tell her this repeatedly.  Then, one day, she inexplicably hits on the headmaster of the quaint one-room schoolhouse in Dingle Bay, Charles Shaughnessey (Robert Mitchum).  Because they’re both sort of good looking, and he’s smart, they get hitched.

After a few scenes, we see why they’re going to be bored with one another.  He’s a stiff, proper middle-aged man with kindness buried deep in his heart, and she’s not terribly bright.  His kindness, of course, is only evident after Rosy begins an affair with a British solider named Doryan (Christopher Jones).  There seems to be no excuse for their affair except that Lean wanted to film one incredible sex scene.  Other than that drawn-out sequence, neither of them share much in the way of conversation or even passion.

I’m not even being flip–the development of the soldier’s character is so bad that  their looks are conceivably the only reason they’re attracted to one another.  What’s worse, when the soldier becomes a ‘major’ character, Robert Mitchum disappears from screen for about 45 minutes.  Does it really make sense to take one of the film’s few assets and jettison it from the pic just to develop an underwritten romance?

Though Ryan’s Daughter is terribly long, it’s mere formula.  We know that eventually we’ll find out how much Robert Mitchum loves his wife, yet she’ll have already shamed herself through her infidelity.

The whole town, comprised of standard-issue Irishfolk, will know that her and the soldier have been sleeping together because, as everyone knows, all towns in Ireland are completely populated by people who get drunk and gossip all day instead of doing real work.

And we know that so many small towns in movies include (a) a self-righteous priest who tells everyone how they must act and announces his authority usually with silence, his white clerical collar doing 75% of the talking; and (b) the village idiot who, with lack of teeth and the inability to even utter the word “Aye,” still manages to know everything about everyone in town and communicate it through exaggerated body language.  While early on, the people in town will torture this man, they’ll later come to trust him as some kind of oracle.

Right.

Lean, who directed such brilliant films as Bridge on The River Kwai, A Passage To India and Lawrence of Arabia should be ashamed to assemble an “epic” (I use the word loosely) from such bare-bones stereotypes.  I spent several months in Ireland and that clearly makes me no expert on the culture.  But, after watching Ryan’s Daughter, I realized that, in my time in the Republic, I hadn’t met more than about five people that in any way resembled his characters.  These people, from Rosy’s father who manages the town pub, to the massively irritating village idiot, are crafted out of wives tales.  They don’t behave like humans; they’re cogs in the machine of Lean’s plot.

While Ryan’s Daughter features two mostly blah romances and a ridiculously underdeveloped political subplot, it’s not entirely without merit. For starters, it is extremely well-filmed and the lead performances are, for the most part, quite good.  While I criticize some aspects of Rosy Ryan’s and Charles Shaughnessey‘s characters, I think they only seem so stupid because the plot corners them into such obsessive one-dimensionality.

Hilariously, though the town is full of these stereotypical hard-drinking, song-singing Irish folk, Robert Mitchum, the only American in the cast, seems the most authentically Irish.  His performance is the best thing in the film.  I liked his reserve and obvious intelligence, and, in the end, when he and Sarah Miles actually start conversing about her infidelity, you only think, “Why couldn‘t the rest of the movie been this insightful?”

Sarah Miles, an actress I’m not very familiar with, is also good in stretches, subtly communicating her hurt and dissatisfaction with facial expressions.

The scenes between Mitchum and Miles, far too infrequent, are very good.  And moments between Trevor Howard, who plays the priest, and Miles are fine–there are two scenes on the beach between both characters that are breathtaking, scenes where the beautiful landscape, while always evident, doesn’t obscure genuine communication.

Still, you’ve got to think about Lean’s film in terms of numbers.  That is, seven or eight truly good scenes don’t carry a film that’s over 200 minutes long.

Ryan’s Daughter eventually just falls into a trap of five scenes of lame-brained gossip and beautiful scenery coupled with one good scene of character development.  We expect Lean to make a brilliantly-shot picture–and he does.  But at the end, we’d prefer less sweeping images of Dingle Bay’s shoreline and some more substantial dialogue.  Understanding the beauty of the film unfortunately requires a major time sacrifice on your part.

A Shock to the System, a pic about an under-appreciated ad man who sets out to exterminate everyone who serves as a roadblock on his path to success, is a fun watch, but little else.  The comedy is generally to my taste–pitch-black.  Michael Caine is, honestly, in one of his best five roles of all time.  Swoosie Kurtz, as his domineering wife, and Elizabeth McGovern, as a beauty at the ad agency where he works, are both fine.  Peter Reigert, as the youn’in whose destined to get the promotion Caine’s character deserves and yearns for, is quite funny.  So what’s missing?

After a second viewing, I’m certain that the script just doesn’t hold together.  There are brilliant scenes of dark comedy followed by pedestrian sequences of cat-and-mouse police games.  The ending, far too predictable, isn’t nearly as over-the-top as it should be.

I do know one thing, though:  nothing that goes wrong is Michael Caine’s fault.

Caine is a completely unique actor who can play any role, no matter how ludicrous, with an expression so debonair we know there is always more going on than meets the eye.  That’s why he’s consistently funny.

In A Shock to the System, Caine doesn’t start out as a conniving prick, just as he didn’t seem to be so sly in the opening frames of Sleuth.  He’s always been the guy in his office who treats secretaries nicely, despises layoffs, and is loyal to his superiors.  People wrongly think he‘s an easy mark.

But, he gets religion right quick.  His wife (Kurtz) is a miserable, materialistic bloodsucker obsessed with only her exercise bike and bitching and moaning about not having enough money to piss away on useless trinkets.  When Graham’s old boss takes (read: gets forced into) early retirement, he thinks he’s a shoe-in for the old man’s executive position.  Yet, his boss-to-be (Peter Reigert) is young, smarmy and ruthless–that is, he’s a perfect fit for the “promotion” Graham Marshall has been coveting for several years.  Graham’s then left out in the cold and scarily glum.

And murder is the only cure for his blues.

We enjoy Caine as an actor, and so, when he decides to go about killing all of those who stand in his way to the top, we cheer for him.  We cheer for him until the bitter end because he is simultaneously charming and sinister.  In the best scene in the film, after Graham figures out a way to off his wife with the use of a short-wired basement light fixture, the police call to inform him she’s left Earth for greener pastures.  His rapid response is pure genius.

Graham’s reaction, after being denied the promotion he thinks he deserves, is likewise brilliant–especially when he finds he’ll be sharing an office with his new boss‘s assistant.  The subtle humor of this scene and Caine’s tremendous outburst that follows contrast with his actions later in the picture that are too dramatic (and predictable).

At a certain point, the movie stops pushing the envelope comedically and becomes an average battle-of-the-intellects chase picture.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that things’ll become complicated by the appearance of a detective who, as played by Will Patton, is clearly no match for Graham Marshall in the brains department.

This glaring mistake in the handling of Patton‘s detective character kills the movie’s flow.  Because the cop is an obvious dope, a guy with a hard-on for crudely solving any sensational case that drifts across his desk, we know he lacks the chops to catch Graham.  If the ad-man’s killings themselves are hilarious and ingenious, the ways in which Graham avoids getting caught afterward are blah.

And his quick affair with McGovern’s character, while it has its moments, is likewise rushed.  She finds the skeletons in his closet all too quickly, thus making their romance minimally involving.  She seems very smart in a couple of scenes, but proves to be duller than Patton’s detective when it matters most.  When she tries to “fool” Graham and turn him in, she fails on a massive level.

Because it’s established midway through that Graham Marshall is the superior intellect in the picture, there’s never a question of whether he’ll get caught after that point.

Regardless of these shortcomings, there is one real reason to actually put this one in your Netflix queue: Michael Caine.   His acting rivals the work he did in films like Sleuth and Hannah and Her Sisters.  When he’s on screen, make a point of looking in his eyes.  In the opening minutes, there‘s a misty innocence as he tries to be the exec everyone loves.  But eventually, when he’s had just about enough of the climbing-the-corporate-ladder bullshit, it’s easy to see the Charles Manson lurking beneath his Don Draper ad-man persona.

At the end, we’ve had the biggest laughs while just looking at his face, or listening to his dry monologues.  The other jokes, the ones that are supposed to make us laugh the loudest, are sometimes less effective.

Worst of all, McGovern, Patton & Co. never come close enough to messing up Graham’s game, and that drains the picture of required suspense (and some humor).  It sucks to watch a movie that makes its lead character so quick and the rest of its cast so comparatively dense.  It’s a relatively good watch, but considering the talent involved, one can’t help but look at A Shock to the System as a missed opportunity.

Right now, I’m writing a series of reviews of Gen-X movies, regardless of whether they’re good or not.  And I’m playing the professor and assigning letter grades to each movie…something I almost never do.

To kick things off, I watched Reality Bites, a movie that’s supposedly all about Generation-X, a week ago.  I sort of remember giving it a spin a few years back and, at the time, I thought it was pretty damn funny and perceptive.

My current (and less favorable) assessment:

Reality Bites (1994)

Reality Bites, Ben Stiller’s directorial debut, is an unworthy Gen-X staple, a mostly cliché story of four Houston college grads who wander out of graduation into dead-end jobs.  While its opening third is perceptive and funny, it ultimately becomes just another formulaic study of young adults trying to find themselves and fall in love in a mean corporate world.

The pic stars Winona Ryder as Lelaina, valedictorian of her college class, who, armed at all times with a video camera, obsessively films all her friends being “spontaneous.” They include the sharp-tongued slacker musician Troy (Ethan Hawke), the funny and sensitive Vicki (Jeneane Garofalo) and the shy Sammy (Steve Zahn).

Though Lelaina works as an associate producer on a morning talk show, her real passion is the documentary she’s crafting about her friends.  She hopes her film, chock full of dime-store insight about relationships and consumerism, will paint an authentic picture of her generation.

The characters have fun with Lelaina’s camera in early scenes, drinking beers, smoking pot and saying whatever comes to mind on top of a Houston skyscraper.  This scene, in an unfamiliar location, really works, and I connected with the new grads and enjoyed listening to the way they talked.

In the following minutes, I was excited about where the picture seemed to be going.  The friends really understand each other and enjoy each other‘s company.  Even as they drink beer, get stoned and end up in a gas station screaming the words to “My Sharona,” I got a delightful chill of recognition.  If the film wasn’t trying to be life-changing at this point, I really didn’t care.  I was having a whole lot of fun watching the characters having fun with each other.

Unfortunately, this unforced charm doesn’t last when the movie starts to take itself way too seriously.

Soon, Lelaina decides to start filming heavy stuff–Vicki gets an AIDS test, Sammy tells his mom he‘s gay, Troy blathers on about his father and being and nothingness.  The documentary (and Stiller’s film), at this point, become a whole lot less compelling.

This footage becomes one of the film‘s major problems.  Though Lelaina’s supposed to be capturing what it’s “really like” to be a 23-year old circa 1994, it appears that her friends, in their ever-increasing melancholy, are just posturing for the camera.  In due time, there’s not a hint of spontaneity or excitement in the whole production, and at its lowest point, everyone sounds like they’re reading lines straight from a teleprompter.

These characters also swiftly wear out their welcome when a love triangle between Lelaina, Troy, and Michael (Ben Stiller), a successful music channel producer, takes shape.  Even after Lelaina and Michael have a great meet-cute, the film loses energy fast.

This romance becomes dull real quick because the “hero” of the movie, Troy, progressively turns into a bigger asshole with each passing moment.  We know that Troy likes Lelaina a lot, but, because he’s so sarcastic and degrades anyone that dares to challenge his philosophies on life, we start to dislike him immensely.

Think about it: if you want to write a compelling romance, you can’t expect your audience to root for a guy who, by midway through the picture, is reduced to an unemployed insult-spewing prick.

Scriptwriter Helen Childress should never have let Troy devolve into such an unlikable guy, especially in a romantic comedy.  While he’s as judgmental as Jack Black’s character in High Fidelity, he’s rarely as charming or funny.  We’re supposed to somehow perceive that Troy, because he usually forgets to shave, is super vulnerable.  Hawke’s character’s been so underwritten that, when he finally lets some emotion show in the film’s final five minutes, it feels entirely phony.
Another crucial mistake is the handling of Ben Stiller’s studio exec character (perplexing, since he directed the picture).

Convention, in lesser Gen-X films like Reality Bites, dictates that he must be a sellout because has a career and wears suits to work.  Since he lacks the infinite spare time to memorize all of Paul Newman’s lines in Cool Hand Luke, he‘s supposedly a phony.

Yet, I think Stiller’s character is the best written in the entire picture.  He’s by far the most interesting and sympathetic of the cast and not the yuppie shark the movie tries to make him out to be.  Despite his corporate gig, he still acts insecure, and questions his own motives in chasing certain success.  The scenes that Lelaina and Michael share together are great, especially a couple in which he tries nervously to articulate his feelings for her.  We’re praying he and Lelaina end up together, but–oh, hell, who am I kidding?  You know what happens.

Reality Bites, not a God-awful film, is brightened at times by the charm of its young actors, especially Winona Ryder and Ben Stiller.  Watching it, I constantly saw untapped potential–the casting and the scenes that were obviously written with a great ear for the way people my age talk come to mind.  It’s Childress’ unwillingness to take chances with her characters that makes this a disappointing, but occasionally funny Gen-X movie.

Grade: C

5.  Author! Author! (Season 1, Episode 22)

The Premise:  Niles has a book deal with a demanding publisher and decides, spur of the moment, that bringing Frasier in on the action might help him get through a bout of writers block.  They decide to write a text on the history of sibling relationships, using Frasier’s radio show as a source for stories of great and awful brother-sister interaction, alike.  While Frasier resists at first, he’s tempted by the fruit of additional fame.

Just after they‘ve collected their material, Niles mentions that George and Ira Gershwin, when writing a symphony, would lock themselves in a hotel room and refuse to leave until their sonata was completed.  The Brothers Crane, mistakenly thinking themselves on the level of the Gershwins, decide to adopt the same tactic.

The title card that reads “George and Ira” is a sardonic springboard for the finest seven minutes of the premier season.  It’ll come as no surprise that the psychiatrist brothers spend $200 on room service and come up way short the prose.  And, as usual, Martin does an outstanding job of helping Frasier and Niles reconcile their differences in the final moments.  This is the first truly great episode of this long-lived sit-com.

The Quote:      

Frasier:  I do not have a fat face!
Niles: Oh, please!  I keep wondering how long you’re going to store those
nuts for winter!

4.  Something Borrowed, Someone Blue (Season 7, Episode 23)

The Premise:  Considered by some to be the last truly magnificent episode of “Frasier,” the season seven finale unfolds in the days before and on the day of Donny (Niles’s divorce lawyer, played by Saul Rubinek) and Daphne‘s wedding.

The circumstances: Niles still loves Daphne, but, on a whim, married his uptight girlfriend Mel (Jane Adams) during a weekend respite a couple earlier; Daphne’s outrageous family, including her preposterously lazy brother Simon, are all in for the wedding; and, to top it all off, Daphne thinks she might have feelings for Niles.

The whole thing starts lightheartedly enough when Simon, probably my favorite of the show’s recurring characters, barges into Frasier’s apartment and somehow comes to the conclusion that Daphne’s having a child.  And he leaves NO euphemism or insult unused.

Nothing quiets down when the whole family treks to northern Washington for the wedding.  Donny, terrified of Daphne’s mom, starts boozing with Roz (Simon‘s date through unfortunate circumstances) at about noon.  Daphne’s entire family gets abundantly trashed at the rehearsal dinner.  And, to end the night, Niles and Daphne have a wonderfully funny and heartfelt conversation–one that proves the show’s writers were, in the midst of scribing chaotic comedic sequences, more than capable of penning sincere, emotional dialogue.

At the original broadcast‘s time, the ending was a bit of a cliffhanger–would Daphne leave Donny and run off with Niles, or go on with the wedding as she kept insisting she would?  In our hearts, we all knew exactly how things would play out.

The Quote:  

Daphne: Oh, for God sakes Dr. Crane!
[They kiss for a few moments.]
Niles: I think you can call me Niles now.

3.  Ham Radio (Season 4, Episode 18)

The Premise:  Frasier, who’s set to direct a classic amateur radio program called “Nightmare Inn,“ finds a way to take something that could be cool and make it miserable.  The entire supporting cast–Gil Chesterton, Bulldog, Noel Shemsky–is present in this ep, and all of them give uproarious performances.

To begin with, the Doctor invites the KACL gang over to rehearse the script.  Hiring a renowned voice actor, Mel White, to read five or six bit parts, Frasier remarks that the man’s German accent sounds just a bit too “Austrian” (among other things).

The spiral downward continues when, after Frasier’s endless nitpicking, Mel bails on the production altogether (final words: “I kvit”).  Niles then excitedly steps in as Mel’s replacement and finds working for his older brother to be supremely intolerable, especially when “Nightmare Inn” actually hits the airwaves.

The night of the broadcast, Roz comes in blitzed on Novocain after an impromptu dentist visit.  Meanwhile, Gil, slated to play the part of a loquacious Englishman, is especially brilliant, and he shines when his favorite monologue’s cut from the final production.  Bulldog, the overbearing sportscaster, freezes when he must read the part of “Mr. Wing,” an Asian tailor. His girlfriend, however, steals the show by botching her solitary line.

“Ham Radio” explodes with comic tension–we know early on that the broadcast will fail, yet we perch on the edge of our seats waiting to see how badly Frasier can screw things up.  Naturally, “Ham Radio” doesn’t let the audience down.

The Quote:

Maxine (Bulldog’s Dyslexic Girlfriend): Look Out! He’s got a…NUG!

2.  The Two Mrs. Cranes (Season 4, Episode 1)

The Premise:  Season four’s premier was a harbinger for the future of the entire series.  Though the first three seasons are excellent, it’s seasons four and five of “Fraiser” that’ve truly stood the test of time.  “The Two Mrs. Cranes” is too good to be true–a whirlwind farcical episode that keeps upping the ante with every passing moment.  It begins with Niles using a tweezers to pull bits of dried fruit from his breakfast muffin.  That’s the mellow part.  It only gets better when Daphne hears from Clive, an English bloke she used to date.  She invites him over to the apartment for a solitary beer.

It gets crazy when Clive actually shows up.  Though she’s actually single, Daphne decides to let her old boyfriend down easy by telling him, in a frenzied moment, she’s married to Niles.  For him, it’s heaven on Earth acting out this fantasy.  And while Frasier half-heartedly agrees to go along with the charade, the biggest mistake the brothers make is condescending to Martin, who walks through the door at an inopportune time.

To mess with his sons, Martin kicks things up a few notches–first, by telling Clive that he used to be an astronaut, and second, by introducing Roz, who stops by to return Frasier‘s opera glasses, as Maris–who, in this case, is supposedly Frasier’s, not Niles’s, wife.  Roz, being herself, immediately starts flirting with Clive, ignoring that she‘s supposed to be playing the part of a separated wife.

When Clive unexpectedly admits that he‘s become rich since Daphne‘s left England,  she becomes smitten with her old flame once again.  In due time, she and Roz start to compete for the Manchurian, exchanging some ridiculous backhanded banter.

In another brilliant farce, the whole fiasco ends pitch-perfectly, and only Martin, the biggest bullshitter of the bunch, comes out of the verbal battle looking like a saint.  Clive’s words near the credits perfectly sum it all up: “You’re the most appalling family I’ve ever seen!”

The Quote:

Daphne: I didn’t mean to put you in an awkward position.
Niles: When it comes to you, no position is too awkward.

**And my favorite episode of “Frasier**

1.  Halloween (Season 5, Episode 3)

The Premise:  A somewhat overlooked episode, I find “Halloween” to be the most inspired and ludicrous of all of the “Frasier” farces.  It’s one of the only episodes of TV to end with the deadly three-word phrase, “To Be Continued” and make it work.

“Halloween” centers on Roz’s potential pregnancy (which, at the end, becomes less ‘potential’), and her exasperation with Frasier when he inadvertently gabs the secret to Daphne in an unlikely, but entertaining conversation.

What’s more, Niles overhears an exchange between Daphne and Frasier and comes to the conclusion that Daphne’s pregnant and Frasier is the father.  Martin, the retired detective, discovers something entirely different: Frasier’s the dad of Roz’s baby.

First consider all the circumstances, and then consider the setting: a Halloween party at Niles’ place where everyone’s costumed like a character from classic literature.  Niles, drunk out of his mind for pretty much the entire running length, is dressed up as Cyrano De Bergerac, with a long plastic nose to boot.  Frasier‘s meanwhile donning a costume from the Canterbury Tales and swears that his “pointy hat is a babe magnet.”

From start to finish, this is Niles’ show.  It helps that he spends the majority of the episode piss-drunk, but it’s also remarkable how much of a mess he makes of the entire situation.  In the end, after he drunkenly proposes to Daphne, and then finds out the truth, I laughed ’til I cried.

Beyond that, the ep is full of brilliant one-liners and a couple of phenomenal sight gags.

Just as in “The Two Mrs. Cranes,” the misstatements and mix-ups pile up like unpaid parking tickets.  It has to be seen (and seen again) to be believed.  This is one of the smartest, funniest half-hours of TV since Mary Tyler Moore cracked up during Chuckles the Clown’s funeral back in 1975.

The Quote:

Roz: No one’s more careful than I am when it comes to birth control. But, then again, even the best protection is only effective 99 out of a hundred times. I can’t beat those odds!

“Frasier,” is probably one of the best three or four sitcoms to ever grace the small screen.  The premise, that of two nitpicky, sophisticated, unathletic psychiatrist brothers and their interactions with their beer-swilling retired cop father, a sex-crazed producer and a flighty British health-care worker, sounds like it could go either way.  It might be just a bit too quirky and self-conscious, right?

That isn’t the case at all.  “Frasier” is a remarkable comedy show that aired between 1993 and 2004, at about the same time when “Seinfeld” was considered the gold-standard for half-hour prime-time sitcoms.  While I adore “Seinfeld,” my favorite show of that era will always be “Frasier.” Being ten years old, I remember watching “Frasier” with my parents and watching half of the jokes whiz clear over my head.  Now, almost fifteen years after I watched my first episode of “Frasier,” I love being able to give it a glance and actually get almost 80% of the jokes.  Honestly, I’ve actually expanded my vocabulary by listening to Niles’ and Frasier’s banter.

“Frasier” succeeds not only because of its incredibly literate writing, but because of its perfect casting.  There are few better comedic duos than Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce (playing the Brothers Crane, Frasier and Niles). And John Mahoney, as Martin, their blue-collar dad, is always amusing and sometimes surprisingly insightful.

Of course, that’s not to leave the women out of the picture.  Peri Gilpin, who plays Frasier’s producer Roz Doyle, is absolutely wonderful and can dish out zingers like almost no other supporting character of sit-coms past.  Jane Leeves, as Daphne, Martin’s health care aide, is likewise great–funny, warm and very sarcastic when need be.

If “Frasier” is brilliant for its writing and casting, it’s also quite different than many sitcoms because it blends intellectual humor, farce and pathos so seamlessly.  For a 30-minute comedy show, the moments of heartfelt dialogue in “Frasier” are far more authentic than those we see in some one-hour dramas.

Without further ado, here’s part one of “The Ten Best Episodes of ‘Frasier‘”:

Honorable Mention:

Give Him The Chair! (Season 1, Episode 19)

Frasier, in an attempt to decorate his apartment more tastefully, buys Martin a new leather chair with some *wink* extra benefits (Swedish massage anyone?).  The consequences of Frasier’s actions are drastic, especially when the hilariously flaky maintenance guy Leo manages to throw Martin’s beat-up recliner away instead of just placing it in storage.

An Affair To Forget (Season 2, Episode 21)

Frasier receives a strange call on the air one day.  A German woman is convinced her husband, a fencing instructor, is having an affair with his best student.  Of course, the instructor’s prized understudy is actually Niles’ wife, Maris.  The final ten minutes of this, from the confused German-to-Spanish-to-English translations, to the epic swordfight, are brilliant.

Room Service (Season 5, Episode 15)

Lillith, Frasier’s ex-wife, and Niles have a one night stand.  Any questions?

Roz and the Schnoz (Season 5, Episode 21)

When Roz got pregnant during season five of “Frasier,” it birthed a whole slew of great subplots.  Meeting the parents of the 20-year old who got her pregnant, Roz is uber-nervous, especially when she finds out they have schnozs the size of Gibraltar.  The ‘nose’ jokes are far-and-above what we’ve come to expect from a sit-com.

                                                                       ***

Numbers 10-6:

10.  High Holidays (Season 11, Episode 11)

The Premise: This is one of the few fantastic latter-day episodes of “Frasier.”  Niles, fearing he never really “acted out” when he was younger, insists on getting baked as a way of showing his father, Daphne and Frasier, that, he too, has the gumption to rebel against the establishment.  The formula is immediately recognizable from previous “Frasier” eps, but the execution is flawless so that all of the plot elements feel fresh.

Niles, who think’s he’s eaten a pot brownie (supplied by Roz), actually hasn’t.  And the contrast of Niles’s actions–thinking he’s blazed–versus the reaction of the character who mistakenly consumed his tasty treat, is mindblowingly funny.  Add in a subplot concerning Frasier’s now-teenage son Frederick’s visit to Seattle with a new and unusual “fashion sense,” and you’re looking at one of the series’ greatest episodes.

The Quote:

Frasier: Dad, where are your pants?
Martin: In the fridge.  I had a reason.  [Fishes out a post-it] Fridge Pants!

9.  Flour Child (Season 2, Episode 4)

The Premise: Martin, Niles and Frasier are stuck in a cab together (imagine the possibilities…), and the woman driving the taxi suddenly goes into labor.  Though Niles Crane, M.D. is of absolutely no help during childbirth, and Martin picks up the slack perfectly, Niles finds himself changed by witnessing the miracle of life first-hand.

Niles decides the best way to figure out if he’d be a good parent is to kick things sophomore year style by pretending a sack of flour he found in Frasier’s cabinet is actually his kid.  Of course, Niles screws it up.  He spears his pretend baby with a chopstick and somehow manages to set the thing on fire.  Even better, none of these actions are visible on screen–we only hear about it in Niles’ nonchalant descriptions of his klutziness.  When his sack of flour meets its untimely demise, I dare you not to howl.

While the humor in “Flour Child” burgeons in the first fifteen minutes, what really grips you is Martin’s speech about actually raising a child near the end.  Niles’s soul-searching in the final minutes is equally emotional (and well-delivered).  While most episodes of “Frasier” develop two or three concurrent storylines–sometimes with only moderate success–this ep actually manages to meld all of its loose ends in a near-perfect way.

The Quote:

Niles: Last night, I actually had a dream my flour sack was abducted and the kidnapper started sending me muffins in the mail.

8.  The Matchmaker (Season 2, Episode 3)

The Premise: New KACL station manager Tom Durant has just moved from London to Seattle after his former relationship went sour.  When Tom first speaks to Frasier, they discuss European travel, opera and mens fashion.  To the impeccably groomed and well-read Frasier, this is a natural conversation between two straight guys.  To Tom, it’s something else.

Frasier finds Tom to be a charming, intelligent guy.  He invites him over for dinner figuring the new station manager might be an excellent suitor for the lovelorn brit Daphne.  There’s only one problem: Tom is gay, and he thinks Frasier is too.  Clearly, this date won’t go as planned.

This could easily be a one note premise, but naturally, “The Matchmaker” aims much higher.  When Tom enters Frasier’s apartment, he has no idea what he’s in for–especially when Niles and Martin tumble into the act.  David Hyde Pierce and John Mahoney do some of their finest work here.  Though I think there are better farcical episodes in later seasons, this is a benchmark installment for the series.

The Quote: 

Frasier:  That’s ridiculous!  Tom is not gay!
Niles:  He seems to be under that impression.

7.  Are You Being Served? (Season 4, Episode 22)

The Premise: Niles, hoping he and his crazy, anorexic wife Maris will go into couples therapy to solve some marital problems, is stunned to find that his wealthy wife would rather serve him with divorce papers.  Just hours later, Frasier and Niles come upon a diary their mother kept, one that seemingly documents all of their shortcomings as children.  Niles finds out through her observations he wasn’t terribly assertive, and Frasier realizes that he had trouble showing affection.  The only consolation is that Niles was wearing a killer tie made from Maris’ old “fat pants.”

Though all of the main players (minus Roz) are in full-tilt comedy mode here, this is truly Niles’ episode, up until the bitter end when he finds out the diary his mother left might not’ve been entirely accurate.  This realization sends the younger Crane on a downward spiral, leading to one of the most inspired resolutions in the show’s history.

The Quote: 

Frasier: If you choose to, you never have to see Maris again.

Niles: Oh, please.  Half the time I couldn’t see her when she was standing right in front of me.

6.  Merry Christmas, Mrs. Moskowitz (Season 6, Episode 10)

The Premise:  Frasier, shopping for a Christmas gift for his producer Roz, accidentally meets Helen Moskowitz, an older Jewish woman who is glad to give him a few shopping tips.  Naturally, she has a foxy daughter, Faye (Amy Brenneman).  Because Frasier’s a doctor, Helen does her best to set him up with her daughter.

Faye and Fraiser hit it off immediately on their first date.  Yet, when Faye and Helen make an impromptu trek to the Elliott Bay Towers (Frasier’s home), things quickly go awry when Faye informs Frasier that her mother mistakenly thinks he’s Jewish.  At the same time, Niles is playing Jesus Christ in a pageant Daphne’s theatre group is putting on.  And Eddie, our faithful supporting dog, is dressed up in a Santa suit and inconveniently appears the second Helen walks through the door.

As usual, instead of telling the truth, Frasier convinces his entire family, including his rough-around-the-edges old man, to act as though they’re a happy Jewish family.  The jokes are sometimes obvious (“The brisket’s still pink!”), but the payoff is entirely original.  Watching Niles try to act Jewish is screamingly funny, especially when he gives a toast ending with the immortal phrase, “Le hayim!  Next year in Jerusalem!”  Frasier’s deadpan response: “Take it down a notch, Tevye.”

The Quote:

Cheating, but the title card that reads “Oy To The World” kills.

***

Part 2 to follow.

Coming out of college with an unusual major and no job prospects is a hell of a scary thing.  Higher ed. ends so goddamn abruptly, and many of us are in no way prepared for those final days.  I spent my entire last semester at school in some kind of sustained haze, grilling burgers, drinking beer out on the back deck with friends and somehow managing to get the highest semester GPA I’d ever achieved in college.  I guess I’d figured out all of the ways to succeed at college without really trying.  That, in turn, gave me false hope that I’d amount to anything out there in the “real world.”

The night before I graduated, I was relaxing in my favorite dive bar with a bunch of my best friends.  We weren’t nostalgic even after ordering our sixth pitcher of the night.  Instead, we talked about random crap like it was any other night of any other year of college.  The next day, I got up, put on a shirt and tie, and zipped up my gown.  And after the keynote speaker and the whole pomp-and-circumstance, I walked back to my old college house, tossed the tassled cap onto the couch, threw the last of my stuff in my Volvo, peeled away from the curb and, only about 30 miles into my trip back home, realized the overwhelming terror.
“Oh, shit,” I muttered to myself listening to an R.E.M. disc. “What the hell am I going to do?  Why didn‘t I stick around just one more night?”  Of course, what I really wanted wasn’t simply one more night, but three or four more years.  I had no job prospects at all.  Not a good start when entering into the worst job market since 1991.

And unlike Adventureland’s protagonist, I had no plans of grad school.  I only knew that, as a Political Science major, I had absolutely no intention of going to law school, still the normal ‘forward path’ for many people with that degree.  James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is in a different territory, sort of–a comparative literature major from Oberlin with the goal of becoming a journalist, he has future plans, but he‘ll need to rethink them.

It’s May 1987 when Adventureland opens.  James learns unfortunately during a post-grad dinner with his parents his dad’s been “transferred to another department,” and his parents won’t be fronting him the cash for his eight-week Eurotrip, much less helping him pay rent in Manhattan while at graduate school.  It’s a real “Oh Shit” moment for the guy, and it couldn’t possibly have come at a worse time.

James Brennan is a really sharp guy, still a virgin, still starry-eyed about the power of education and actually acquiring knowledge (he remarks to his very wealthy college housemate that he “reads poetry for pleasure”).  Like most comparative literature majors, he’s completely blindsided by the horrors of the real world and a bad economy.  He tells his mom he has no idea of what to do unless “someone needs a fresco restored.”  While he thought he’d be kicking back in France and Germany for a few months post-grad, he’s going back home to live with mom and dad and forced to get the dreaded summer job.

After applying to a couple of jobs at restaurants and finding out he has no experience in that field, James goes to work at a big amusement park, manning goofy carnival-type games with his buddy Frigo, a guy who insists on punching him in the nuts as a standard greeting (instead of, say, giving him a high five).

Things could be hell on earth for James, except for the fact that he meets a wonderful cast of characters, his workmates: the cynical, hilarious Joel (Martin Starr); Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the guitar-playing maintenance guy who apparently jammed with Lou Reed once; and Em (Kristen Stewart), the sharp and beautiful girl that, as an NYU undergrad, seems far too smart to be working at an amusement park.

At this point, Adventureland starts to play itself out on two levels.  In the most basic respect, it’s a pic about shitty summer jobs, about the hope for romance, about getting stoned and drunk every night because, face it, the work these kids do during the day demands absolutely no cognitive ability.  We can all relate because we’ve all worked jobs like this–whether it be flipping burgers, lifeguarding or working at the mall, we know the dualistic joy of irresponsibility and the misery of boredom in these minimum-wage gigs.

Yet, on a deeper level, there’s massive uncertainty lurking.  While the kids who’re still in high school can afford to screw around all summer long, James picks up extra shifts, trying to figure out how to make enough money to pay for graduate school on his own.  That he must reassess his future at such an inconvenient time adds to the more ‘serious’ aspect of the story.  On top of that, we sense watching the film that the laid-back work environment at a place like Adventureland will probably be dead a few years later when a corporation decides to buy the park out.

The owners of the Adventureland, Bobby and Paulette (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig in two brilliant performances), know more than any adults should about running a theme park.  They’re weirdly enthusiastic about their jobs, but also a touch cynical when it‘s most necessary.  When James goes to apply for a job at the park just two weeks after graduation, he doesn’t even have to speak, much less interview to make minimum wage.  Coming into the ‘executive’ office, he’s surprised that no one cares about his former experience mowing his neighbor’s lawn.

“By accepting this [Games] T-shirt, you are…,” Bobby says, half-seriously, before Paulette simply mutters, “hired,” finishing the sentence with a mild eye-roll.  Bobby mentions that the ceremonial passing of the “Games” T-shirt to his employees is usually more momentous, and this scene gets some of the biggest laughs of the picture.

The only advice the pair can offer James is: “No one ever wins a giant-ass panda.”  When, on James’s second day, someone does indeed win the most coveted amusement park prize by managing to beat a rigged game, the literature major frets about his future at Adventureland.  Far from a snobby post-grad, James takes his crappy job pretty seriously.  The scene is doubly amusing and serious: James doesn’t shirk responsibility in the face of a bad economy, but thinks his life is over when one kid walks away with the huge stuffed panda bear.  We see Eisenberg’s face fall a bit, and watch Kristen Stewart’s easygoing charisma jolt him back from melancholy.

And while ironic speech patterns and pop-culture references abound throughout Adventureland, serious emotional connection between its characters is palpable.  In fact, the cast blends so perfectly, one could see it spinning off into a relatively good sitcom.  (I mean that as a compliment, actually.)

Adventureland could certainly be a lamer film.  It could be a stupid throwaway party flick where kids spend their entire summers getting hammered, fucking and (maybe) finding romance in the most vapid ways.  Hell, it might’ve been a more successful pic if it took the easier way out.  Thankfully, it instead aims toward Hughesian territory, giving its young adults the chance to actually form meaningful relationships instead of having them trade pointless dialogue and share badly filmed sex scenes.

Amid the gratuitous alcohol and pot consumption, there are a host of complications, including a blossoming romance between James and Em, both like-minded intellectuals with baggage.  They both care very much for each other, but find it hard to build a stable relationship because of their insecurities.

Em, every college intellectual’s wet-dream, has an ongoing affair with Connell, the maintenance guy, for the shallowest of reasons.  James, the bright but hopelessly insecure virgin, can’t help but lust after the park’s sexpot, Lisa P, especially after Em gives him the brush off in an abrupt, yet exceptionally true-to-life scene.

Among all of these complications are bits of humor, sprinkled perfectly throughout the entirety of the pic.  Bobby and Paula, played by SNL vets Hader and Wiig, provide a comic center, serving as less-than-ideal mentors to the teenage and twenty-something workers.  In one scene, Joel gets beat up by a rowdy client, and James finds himself, after slugging the attacker in retaliation, running for shelter in Bobby’s office with Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law” screaming in the background and the attacker in tow.

Once he bursts into the office terrified, breathlessly shouting “People are trying to kill me!,” Paula flips a baseball bat directly into Bobby’s hands as though the motion was second nature.  When the testosterone-rushed parkgoer tries to break through the office door and start a fight with anyone inside, Bobby, wild-eyed, simply holds up the bat threateningly and launches into a profanity-laced schpeel. “Get out of my doorway, motherfucker!” he screams. “Just give me a fucking reason! You don’t know what I’m capable of!”  The attacker, who was ridiculously macho seconds earlier, naturally runs off like a scared toddler.

But other comic scenes are less obvious, as when James and Joel talk about the abundance of bad music flowing through Adventureland’s stereo.  As the epically horrific pop tune “Rock Me Amadeus” blares in the background, James simply insists that he’d rather have an ice pick shoved into his aural canal than hear one more song by Falco.  Because the soundtrack in Adventureland spans Lou Reed to Big Star to The Cure, it’s hilarious to hear “Rock Me Amadeus” polluting the airwaves multiple times throughout our protagonist’s summer.  And anyone whose ever spent time at a theme park knows that, unfortunately, the songs playing from those speakers-disguised-as-rocks are generally awful.

And, when the younger guy Frigo insists on punching James in the balls every chance he gets, we consistently laugh at his sophomoric antics.  Somehow, that shit is still funny when you’re 24.

Clearly, Adventureland is not an entirely serious movie (nor does it strive to be), but, compared to director Greg Mottola’s Superbad (2007), it’s got quite a bit more heft.  While I would never be caught saying a negative word about Mottola’s first picture, an often hilarious and insightful film about teenagers, Adventureland is different, and is, in some ways like a Breakfast Club for the early-20s crowd.

Mottola does something unusual by placing his young adult characters into a traditionally teenage environment.  When injecting smart college students into shitty jobs, he faithfully shows how they’d react in those situations.  Unsurprisingly, they do, in some ways, behave like teens from a John Hughes picture.  Yet, in other ways, the characters, many several years past age 17, are more insightful and jaded.  They all seem to kind of dislike their parents, sure, but the ways in which they react to the ‘authority figures’ in the movie are fresh and more nuanced.

Mottola’s script is extremely strong, but it‘s the actors’ charm, wit and depth that bring his writing to life.  Eisenberg, who I first saw in The Squid and the Whale (2005), is fantastic, playing a bright and awkward college grad pitch-perfectly.  His character is kind of a throwback to the intellectual post-grads in the movie Kicking and Screaming (1995; Noah Baumbach, interestingly, directed both The Squid and Kicking).  James, like the characters in the 1995 film, is almost too educated and strange to fit into the typical 9-to-5 world.  After watching Eisenberg come alive in this film, The Squid, Roger Dodger (2002; an underrated film, I may add) and of course The Social Network, I’m positive that he’s one of America’s best young actors.

As for Kristen Stewart…holy shit.  She brings a depth to this role that I could never have expected going in, especially after watching her sleepwalk through a couple of the Twilight sagas.  It’s obvious that she’s a gifted actress and more than capable of playing a sensitive young woman.  While she could approach her character, one with amazing natural beauty, intelligence and good taste, with an air of pretension, Stewart does the unexpected–she plays Em honestly.  This makes her a perfect match for Eisenberg’s character.  Their chemistry isn’t smoldering, but a bit understated and comfortable.  Their scenes together provide many of the film’s pleasures.

Ryan Reynolds, who was, in party pics like Waiting… and Van Wilder, completely competent and uninteresting, does a lot with his supporting role.  Here he gives his best performance, playing a character well-suited to his real life nice-guy personality.  No doubt good-looking, Connell is still a depressing case like David Wooderson from Dazed and Confused, working a mediocre job, banging girls ten years his junior and lying about how he once played guitar with Lou Reed.  It’s good to see Reynolds play a character who is a little less of a superficial asshole and a little more humble and unsure of himself.

And Martin Starr, as the hyper-cerebral Joel, is a welcome addition to the cast.  Though I got the idea in a couple of early scenes he was trying way too hard to sound hip, he becomes more interesting throughout the course of Adventureland.  When a girl breaks his heart near the end, Joel reveals himself to be a fascinating and deep character and not just another lovesick 20 year old using pop-culture references and sardonic humor to get through each day.

***

I was baffled by a great majority of the reviews for Adventureland.  Many critics didn’t pan Mottola’s second pic–they simply ignored it.  It became the typical 3-star film of 2009, and a whole lot of good movie critics called it “nice” and “sweet” and the like.  In many reviews, there were no interesting observations about the characters and no analyses of the similarities between the 1987 and 2009 economic climates.  Later in 2009, when critics were talking endlessly about Up In The Air, Precious, and An Education, they failed to give even a second mention to a truly great film about young adults.

After recently writing about Dazed, another film that critics seemed to mildly enjoy but quickly forget, I’m convinced this pic, like Dazed, will garner further acclaim and exposure in future years.  As movies like The English Patient have already disappeared into the catacombs, Dazed lives on, enjoyed by heaps of moviegoers in the 18 years since its initial release.

It’s my hope (and prediction) that, in five or six years, Adventureland will join the ranks of Dazed and The Breakfast Club as one of the most perceptive movies about young adults of the past few decades.

Of course, I could be wrong.  Maybe Adventureland is not the great movie I believe it to be.  Yet, I will, for the rest of my life, treasure one scene where the characters fuck around in bumper cars after eating pot brownies with The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” playing in the background.  My friend‘s statement about this scene was dead-on: “You just can’t teach this stuff.”  That statement applies to the movie in general–you can’t teach people how to make a movie like Adventureland.  Even in its simplicity, it defies formula almost every step of the way.

Slater: Are you cool, man?
Mitch: Like how?
Slater [rolls eyes]: Ohhhhkay…
[Pause]
Pink [bemused]: He was just asking if you got high…

It’s the last day of school.  It’s time to think about the future…or just get wasted instead…or both?

Dazed and Confused is a far more entertaining movie than it has any right to be.  Hearing about it from a friend seven years ago, I figured it’d be a slightly more insightful than-average high-school rom-com, but with no interesting conclusion, no boy-gets-girl, nothing.  I was hesitant to give this one a spin to say the least.  And that’s even after he told me: “This movie’s gonna change your life, bro.  It just makes sense.  It’s insane.”

Yeah, Dazed has minimal plot, and even with a couple of “main” characters, it’s a hodgepodge affair, a slice-of-life movie that switches quickly between scenes involving revolving combinations of its characters.  So why’s it so compelling, so brilliant and ‘insane,’ and in many ways, underrated?

My sort of existential answer: it just is.  Like many of the characters in the film itself, Dazed is scarily matter-of-fact–romantic, funny enough when it needs to be and understated and observant the rest of the time.

This pic, arguably director Richard Linklater’s finest achievement, does nothing in particular except explore the emotional crises of people of a certain age, using a host of vignettes to make a bigger point–one which, I think, centers on how differently we interpret our adolescent years the more we age.  Don’t approach Dazed expecting anything more.  Take it as it comes, ponder it afterward.  Then watch it again.

Foremost, this is a most unconventional picture because its characters actually talk like teenagers, not 27-year old soap opera stars playing 17-year olds in a hopeless Porky‘s-rehash.  The movie effectively transports us back to those carefree days of beer parties, summer romances and wasting time sitting by the pool, always harboring a buzz.  And then it surprisingly does something more.

Linklater’s not content to just show us what parties in the ‘70s might have looked like in Kodachrome pictures.  We become a part of the action.  Even though Dazed takes place in 1976, in the careful way it plays off teenage nostalgia, it is a surprisingly timeless piece of work.

On the surface, the pic’s about a group of high-school juniors trying, not always successfully, to live life to the fullest in Austin, TX on the last day of school. The movie begins with Aerosmith‘s “Sweet Emotion” on the soundtrack, the rolling of a fat doob and footage of a few kids buying and smoking weed in the school parking lot, high-fiving and smiling.  Using this as a launching pad, Linklater’s work then moves from one event to another, showing us a series of short clips in the lives of all of its “main” characters.  But, again, something more’s lurking beneath the surface. Don’t cue the Eve 6 just yet kids: no one here’s singing “Here’s to the Night.”

At the center of Dazed is Randall ‘Pink’ Floyd (Jason London), a very good quarterback going through an end-of-high-school dilemma–whether or not to keep playing football his senior year.  The coach is making the players sign a lame-ass pledge that says they will not engage in “illegal activities” (e.g. drinking and drugs) during season.  Considering that everyone in the high school is pretty much blazed 24/7, this is a tough sacrifice.

Pink’s buddies on the football team tell him to just sign the damn pledge and get trashed anyway.  They‘ll all be doing the same thing behind the coach‘s back anyway.  His stoner comrades, like Ron Slater (Rory Cochrane), tell him to forget the whole thing and spend his senior year partying.

As Pink faces these ‘harrowing’ problems, kids like Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) who’re about to enter high school go through identity crises of their own.  They’re subjected to utterly ludicrous but hilarious hazing rituals that are, thankfully, not sugar-coated.  We watch equally amused and horrified as the younger guys are paddled by the toughest jocks, and the younger girls are publicly demeaned in a parking lot by the senior chicks.

And to top things off, the huge party another stoner, Pickford (Shawn Andrews), planned for the last day of school is called-off at the last minute when his parents see a deliveryman unloading a dozen kegs in the driveway.

Later, Linklater follows three honors students (Adam Goldberg, Anthony Rapp, Marisa Ribisi) cruising around and looking for a party, who’re deciding one year before graduation to slow down on the studying and start looking for some “worthwhile visceral experience.”  Their journey will begin, they think, by going to Pickford’s party, but they only find out it’s been canceled when they get there and his dad answers the door.  Being hopelessly uncool, they’d never gotten the message it was called off.

The canceled party, what was supposed to be the cornerstone of the long night ahead, ends up spurring a lot of soul-searching.  With nowhere to go but in circles, all of the kids–geeks, stoners, greasers, punks and jocks–find themselves at the mercy of an endless spring night.  They buy six-packs, smoke pot, play pool, trade rumors, smoke more pot and cruise around looking for the next best thing.  Some football players ride with a bunch of cases in the trunk of their car, handing beer out to underage girls and chasing incoming freshman guys (who snuck away from the junior high dance at the town’s Rec Center) with their decorated handmade paddles.

All of the film’s characters eventually meet up with one another, at least in passing, some sharing stronger friendships than others.  Pink is friends with the jocks, the stoners and the geeks, and thus gets the most screen time.  He has a girlfriend and digs on another cute earthy chick, but neither partnership is all that valuable to him–kind of like many high school flings we sort-of, kind-of remember five years post-grad.

And Pink’s friends hassle him about not signing the pledge sheet his coach gave him, but only one, Benny (Cole Hauser) takes major offense to his indecision, actually taking the time to speak with him in the front seat of an El Camino during a late-night get together.  Pink and Benny argue, but never share another scene after their disagreement.  The last we see of Hauser’s character is a shot of him drunk, barely able to stand up from his lawn chair.  He’ll likely forget most of the earlier exchange.  Their camaraderie is unexamined, and seems sort of cursory–kind of like many high school friendships.

Likewise, the conversations between Pickford, Slater and Pink are mostly about drugs and the better shit supposedly going on later that night.  Everyone hangs out at the Emporium, the town’s pool hall, leaves to get stoned in Pickford’s car, returns to play pool and repeats this pattern over and over.  On one burn run, Pink, Mitch and a couple of guys get themselves into a hilarious series of predicaments that include bowling balls, trashcans, mailboxes and a handgun.  It’s definitely the highlight of the long night.

But even as this night chugs on, just as the night Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfuss experienced in American Graffiti did, Dazed becomes more and more poignant, and as more drugs are smoked, the characters become increasingly intriguing.  It shares some things in common with Graffiti, the gold-standard when it comes to adolescent comedies.  Dazed has less of a “finished” ending than Graffiti, but it captures the feel of a specific time and place brilliantly, just as George Lucas’s picture did.

It is also different, though: while Dreyfus’s character leaves for college and Howard’s character sticks around to form a more meaningful relationship with his girlfriend, the kids in Dazed finish the night without any tangible direction.  They are on the prowl for meaning, and even as the sun rises, they have not actually decided on clear future paths.  They have only figured out which responsibilities they’d prefer to avoid.

***

Why write about a party movie like Dazed and Confused, someone recently asked me.  Well, first of all, is it really just a party movie?  Even if that’s the case (I don‘t think it is), I guess I talk about it so often because it makes me feel something deep in my gut each time I put it on.  Perhaps, even being a pessimist, I see more in the picture than most.  A talk with an old fraternity brother made me give this picture a couple serious viewings.

“Man, that summer after I graduated, I only stayed home once,” he exclaimed.  “We were fucked up every single night!”  Listening to him, I was also reminded of the wistful Lester Burnham from American Beauty, who spoke of his days flipping burgers as the most glorious time in his life. “All I did was party and get laid,” the character in Sam Mendes’ masterpiece reveals.  My friend, using different words, said about the same thing.

The characters in Dazed, of course, are a different breed than my friend (or Les Burnham) altogether because they‘re in the moment, not a few years past it.  They haven’t reached the times in adulthood when they realize that working the drive-thru, drinking the nights away and always getting laid actually might actually represent everything good about life.  ‘Tis a shame Pink doesn’t get it, I thought, watching the pic a week ago.

Pink, the guy with the ‘heaviest’ personal problem, remains pretty cool about his lack of direction.  He does so even in the final frames.  “If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself,” the football player muses, not very panicked, minutes from the end.

Slater, stoned and drunk during one outing in Pickford’s Camaro, likewise makes fun of the girls in his own class and talks excitedly of “getting to college,” as if the next four years will actually be more radical than the previous four.  Watching him talk, we laugh at his droning, but we’d probably bet money he’d be equally disappointed with “enlightened” college women (and higher education itself), too.

Still, both characters, one a jock who enjoys his fair share of good times, another, a stoner who enjoys far more grass than Easy Rider’s Captain America and Billy combined, are obsessed with this idea of “something more,” though “something” is never clear.  College football, for instance, is the subject of Pink‘s musings, though he doesn’t see it as a worthwhile goal.  The other jocks, less introspective, though more gung-ho than Pink, are, I guess, living in the moment for football and keg parties.  Guys like Benny actually seem sad, not even dreaming of anything beyond the last high-school football season.

One of the brainiest characters in the picture, Cynthia (Marisa Ribisi), simply says the 1970s are a lost cause and hopes maybe the ‘80s will be “radical.” Even the smart kids, as intelligently as they talk, are hardly driven.  We wonder, after listening to all of these analyses of youth and adulthood, if these characters will always remain so detached.  It’s as if the kids are praying for a life-altering event like another Vietnam War to jolt them from their collective boredom and sweep them into fulfilling lives.

If most of the kids seem confused, there’s one guy who talks as if he has the answers.  And this group’s unreliable oracle comes in the clothes of a 23-year old city worker, decked out in pink bell-bottomed corduroys, a cigarette always in his mouth, a brew always in hand.  A former football star, his life is spent in neutral.  At an age where he should be at least considering growing up, he has few goals and works a boring job for menial wages.  He’s considering college, but enjoys getting high and avoiding responsibility way more.  He tries desperately to sound like he’s seen it all before even if his ambitions never moved beyond scoring touchdowns on the old high school gridiron.

“If it’s not that piece of paper, it’s gonna be some other decision they’re gonna try to make for you,” David Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey) tells Pink near the final frames, trying to sound enlightened.  “The older you get, the more rules they’re gonna try to push on you.  You gotta do what Randall ‘Pink’ Floyd wants to do. You just gotta keep on livin’, man.  L-I-V-I-N.”

This 23-year old who tells Pink to keep “livin’,” is at once the most interesting and most depressing character in Dazed.  You all know who he is, though.  In the last fifteen years, Wooderson’s become something of an inexplicable cult hero in everyday adolescent life.  Even those who haven’t viewed Dazed will remember his immortal quote:

“That’s what I love about those high school girls, man.  I get older, they stay the same age.”

Yet the days when he was a great running-back for the high school football team will scarily never be matched again, and the only cure for his loneliness is behaving as he does–by dating girls barely old enough to drive.  And watching the high-school juniors in Dazed, we sense some of them will be Wooderson clones in just five years time.  They’ll bask in athletic glory as long as possible until they wake up one day, 26-years old, and realize they’ve gone nowhere.  They’ll be obsolete, and kids will make jokes about them as one of the geeks does about Wooderson: “You know when he graduated, we were, like, three, right?”

***

Apart from it’s wonderfully developed characters, Dazed is wholly authentic because it chooses to avoid a contrived storyline altogether and focus exclusively on tone.  If the picture deals with some adolescent rites of passage briefly, it’s only because it’d rather focus more on what it feels like to be 17-years old.  Linklater captures that angst, the fear that no one takes you seriously and the kid’s attempts at sounding enlightened even without much ‘life experience.’ And thankfully, the movie doesn’t end at Prom.

In high school, when I first viewed the pic, I thought Linklater’s characters seemed to know a whole lot.  I’d heard all these conversations before back then, at parties, by the pool, sitting on someone’s back porch, etc.  The characters’ words sounded like they were lifted directly from 1000 dialogues I’d had with my best friends.  “Livin’” was practically a tagline for kids graduating from high school in 2005 (as I’m sure it was in 2004 and 2003 and 2002 and so on).

But these days, with a few more years under my belt, Dazed doesn‘t give off the same vibe.  The kids in the movie don’t seem to know as much as they once did.   That’s not to say that Linklater’s film is less relevant to those who‘ve graduated, but that the film actually evolves with the viewer.  Anymore, the kids in the picture just seem bored and searching for meaning, but not enlightened.  Wooderson, at one time a hero to us high-schoolers, is now kind of a relic.  I can now only sympathize with the characters’ uncertainties rather than identify with them.

And I imagine that, in ten years, my take on Dazed will be different than it is right now.

My favorite character in Dazed, Slater, is proof that Linklater “gets” what it‘s like to be young, mad and directionless.  One conversation in particular sticks out, one where he adamantly describes the way George Washington intended for marijuana to be a cash crop for the southern states during the American Revolution.

Slater, smoking a joint, muses:

And so he grew fields of it, man. But, behind every good man is a woman, and that woman was Martha Washington, man.  And everyday when he’d come home, she’d have a big fat bowl just waiting for him, man.  She was a hip, hip lady, man.

We laugh at not only his words, but also that he takes this topic so seriously.  His sincerity in this scene, fueled by the herb, is scarily true-to-life, so we smile with recognition.  And I say “scarily true to life” because everyone has one friend like this, who spouts these ridiculous ideas and somehow get even the most straight-edged people to agree with his theories.

Linklater makes Slater absolutely hysterical and completely crazy the whole way through, but there is no punch line, no standard payoff, to his most of his bantering.  For a minute or two, the camera sticks right with him, just as if an outsider who came into this conversation mid-way through wouldn’t want to leave.  When Slater’s finished talking, the camera moves on, his thoughts just a momentary stopping point.  Slater hasn’t covered any ground, or gotten any closer to getting his shit together.  But Linklater empathizes.

Diverse as they are in subject, what all of Linklater’s films have in common is that sincere empathy for the brutally confused, but frequently idealistic lives of lost young adults.

His first movie, Slacker (1991), a brilliant portrait of Austin, TX in the early-1990s, captures the bizarre 18-to-25 period of disenchantment perfectly, too.  In the picture, loonies, stoners and burned-out ex-cons alike drift around the city without much direction, and the focus rapidly shifts from one story to another, never returning to the same person more than once.  The camera itself appears curious, breaking off from one group and joining up with another, taking the baton from one line of dialogue and running to the next conversational stopping point.

Suburbia (1996), while not a great movie, still captures Slacker‘s spirit, using a rockstar’s return to his old hometown to show how the kids stuck there have no escape, and worse, have little desire to leave.  Still drinking 40s behind the local mini-mart, they resent the success of their former friend, but do nothing to make their own lives better, repeating the same conversations over and over, staying out all night, perhaps looking for a glimmer of truth in each daybreak.

And Before Sunrise (1995), one of my favorite movies, shows two college kids coming to grips with themselves and their relationship over one night in Vienna through tender, intelligent conversation.  These two 20-somethings, who meet on a train, work through a roundabout rationalization of their youth, their parents’ expectations and their eventual love for one another.

In Sunrise, the characters seem to think they have a chance together even though we, the audience, know they don’t.  They promise each other at the end to meet in Vienna six months after their long night together, but watching Ethan Hawke’s train depart, it’s clear whatever they had will be lost, their dreams of being together totally impossible.  Watching Before Sunset, the 2004 sequel, the audience observes saddened as the former lovers come to grips not with the love they once shared, but with their unhappiness as dreary adults.

And it’s in Before Sunset‘s characters’ unhappiness that we realize the full scope of Linklater’s abilities as a filmmaker.  The adults in Before Sunset used to be like some of the kids in Dazed and Confused and became the angst-ridden college students like those in Before Sunrise.  It’s as though Linklater, in his remarkable wisdom, saw the future of all of Dazed‘s characters in some of his later pictures.  Whether Pink played football in college, or guys like Benny became city laborers or Cynthia went on to manage a hedge fund, perhaps they were all destined for somewhat unfulfilling lives.  They’d probably even start to view their high school years with more optimism in their late-30s.

While Linklater has always created phenomenal three-dimensional characters, he focuses meticulously on time and setting in his films, too.  It’s especially noticeable in Slacker, which was actually filmed in Austin and catches a great deal of the local color.  Before Sunrise, made in Vienna, also captures the setting in a very unique way by introducing us to local coffee shops, crummy bars and some lesser-explored areas of the city.

Then consider Linklater’s attention to detail in smaller scenes in Dazed and Confused.  In one scene, Pink and his friends sit in the bed of a pickup truck in the fading hours of daylight drinking beer, and in the background, the sign for the movie theatre has only one title: Family Plot, Hitchcock’s last film.  It premiered in 1976.  No one talks about the movie–the title simply sits there on an Austin multiplex’s marquee, background to another funny, unserious conversation.  But having that sign as a background to the conversation makes the kids’ world seem more true-to-life.

And look at the way Linklater captures the baseball uniforms of the time, the football coaches’ goofy wardrobes, the hairstyles, the specific layout of the Top-Notch Burger drive-in, the way the grocery store clerk simply asks the incoming freshman Mitch “You’re 18, right?” when he buys beer.  Everything is done perfectly, but not in a loud manner.  If someone said this movie was made in the 1976, I may not argue the point.

The director seems completely attuned to the fact that not everyone in the ‘70s dressed like Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.  Kids wear T-shirts and jeans to school and dress up a little bit (not loudly) to go out at night.  Only the stoners never change their clothes between the classes they skipped and parties they somehow got a ride to.  And face it–which stoners ever changed clothing after school to go drink and smoke weed three hours later?

Even the soundtrack in Dazed is so tossed-off that it feels carefully chosen, as if Linklater’s playlist mirrors a 1970s AM radio broadcast.

The music in, say, American Graffiti was fundamental to the overall tone, if only because of the significance of listening to the radio, not because “Come Go With Me” had any major cultural import.

Likewise, in Dazed, the tunes are mostly background music, never really telling us what’s going on.  We hear “Low Rider” and “Show Me The Way” and “Livin’ in the U.S.A.” The music is there to give a goosebumps-inducing sense of time and place, just like the music in George Lucas’s pic had us feeling that we were living alongside of 1962‘s graduating class in some anonymous Southern California suburb.

And it makes sense that the songs Linklater chose, cuts that were once so popular on the radio in the early- and mid-1970s, are now strangely forgotten.  Songs like “Rock & Roll Hoochie-Koo” and “Fox on the Run,“ while enormous hits at the time, would scarcely be remembered if it weren’t for this movie.

If there’s a great scene featuring music of the time, the one with Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” is one of the finest.  Mitch, Pink and Wooderson enter the pool hall when nothing much is happening.  We heard Dylan’s scratchy voice faintly when the guys are outside, but as they enter the Emporium, and cigarette smoke billows out the door, the scene comes alive as the song‘s chorus explodes.

Trite as it may sound on the page, scenes like this are essential to Dazed and Confused.

***

Since plot is absent, the movie ends at its natural stopping point–when everyone simply gets tired at 6 AM after a nightlong party and goes to bed, “Tuesday‘s Gone“ playing in the background.  A few stragglers, Pink, Slater and Wooderson included, end up on the 50-yard line of their school’s football field smoking a joint, debating their existences.  Don, Pink’s close friend, simply says that he wants to look back on his years in high school and say “I did it the best I could when I was stuck in this place.”

I guess I couldn’t have said it better myself–and it’s that line that sticks with me after my most recent viewing of Dazed.  Even as we look back, we gotta keep trucking forward, telling ourselves that, however our high school experience turned out, through those days and nights of drinking and conversation and shitty jobs and JV sports, we did it the best we could.  Those small moments as clueless 17-year olds are forever engrained in our memories.  The world seems wide open then, and that’s rightly enough to scare anyone a year from graduation.

As Wooderson’s SS crests a hill in the final moments of the movie, as four characters go to buy Aerosmith tickets in Houston, we’re left with the impression we’ve just had the best, longest night of our lives.  Like I said, we didn’t just watch it–we lived it.

As for the characters in Linklater’s picture, I dunno.  They’re repeating the same cycle over and over I guess, taking one more uncertain step into the future, hoping that the open highway between Austin and Houston might offer the answers they’re looking for.  It likely won‘t, but whatever the case, I’d give anything to be riding shotgun in Wooderson’s car.  There’s nothing like being 17 and being totally lost, I realize now, seven years later.  You can only hang on to that terrifying excitement for so long before the responsibilities of adulthood gobble you up.

When you saw Stand By Me (1985) for the first time, who was the character you really connected with?  If you asked most people who’d seen the movie, the answer would be Gordy (Wil Wheaton) or Chris Chambers (River Phoenix), the two smartest kids in Rob Reiner’s masterpiece.  Disregarding Wheaton for the moment, good as he was, you could easily see that River Phoenix was the remarkably talented actor in the movie, even at the ripe age of 12.  He was quiet and acted self-assured.  He was also insecure and scared–a terrified teen from a terrible background–but pushed on in scene after scene with false confidence until he finally cracked.  Life must’ve been exhausting for Chris Chambers.  We know for sure that it was for the actor River Phoenix, who died of a heroin overdose at age 23.

Running On Empty, a very good movie helmed by a very good director (Sidney Lumet),  showcases River Phoenix’s talents so well that, watching it and also knowing how his life fizzled, leaves crying as the only possible outcome.

The film achieves greatness in many scenes, and is certainly worth viewing, but somehow the pieces never fit together to make something truly fantastic.  Somehow it’s Phoenix’s performance that contributes to the feeling that we’ve watched an incomplete film.  He’s so fantastic that no one in the film, even the adults (minus Christine Lahti), can compete with his chilling screen presence.

Lumet’s film is about a family of outlaws, headed by Arthur and Annie Pope (Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti) as two aging fugitives.  Once young radicals who called their parents things like “fascist swine,” they were involved in blowing up a napalm laboratory during the 1970s while the war in Vietnam approached a depressing end.   In the protagonists’ attempts at social justice, they unknowingly blinded an innocent bystander, a janitor mopping floors.

Since then, they’ve been on the run, moving from one city to another, changing identities and last names the way most people change pairs of pants.  Early on, bunking in a hotel room after they’ve just flown the coop on one more backwoods town, the sons watch the coldly objective way their parents are portrayed by national media.  Danny Pope (River Phoenix), who’s been through more of these impromptu moves than his brother, is unconcerned.  He pulls out an 88-key paper mimic of a piano keyboard and silently practices his passion.  Harry (Jonas Abry), on the other hand, asks his brothers a raft of questions.  Phoenix answers his brother’s inquiries quietly, keeping his mind mostly on the music he can hear only in his head.

In this hotel room, in yet another town, Arthur shaves his beard and Annie dyes her hair another variation on blonde.  Danny gets rid of his huge glasses.  The license plate on the van they’re driving changes a couple of times after this, and eventually, the Popes are living somewhere in New Jersey, working common jobs, getting paid in cash, renting a ramshackle house and staying just one click ahead of the FBI.

Running on Empty moves gradually (but not slowly), allowing us necessary time with most of the main characters.  We see scenes that are doubly hysterical and heartbreaking.  Consider one scene where Arthur, who’s just found out his mother’s died, comes home and takes his anguish out on the family.  He cruelly quizzes Danny on his own, his mother’s and his brother’s “new names.” At one point we laugh at the absurdity of it all, but then we feel the tragedy, not for Arthur and Annie Pope, but for Danny, a gifted musician, to have to endure this charade year after year.  It’s even sadder that Arthur hadn’t seen his mother in almost 20 years and finds out about her death through an old friend whose  job is to provide him with fake birth certificates.

Then there is the most sad and brilliant scene in the movie, one in which Annie approaches her father, and they have a frank and tearful discussion.  As the father talks about the dreams he had for his own daughter, Annie Pope speaks of those she has for her own son, and asks him for one last favor until she disappears into obscurity again.  They talk simply but deeply about what it is to do the right thing–and Annie knows that she must let her son pursue his dreams, even though she’ll likely never see him again.  Christine Lahti has never been better than in this sequence.

And the romance that blossoms between Danny and his music teacher’s daughter, Lorna (Martha Plimpton, in a very good performance) is fully realized.  They fall in love, but even as they’re increasingly honest with one another, there’s a deeper truth Danny struggles to hide.

That said, there are problems with Running on Empty.  One scene in the family’s kitchen where the whole family engages in a supposedly “poignant” song-and-dance routine of James Taylor’s vapid single “Fire and Rain” is nauseating.  It’s extremely trite and only distracts from the more interesting human relationships at hand.

And I also found Judd Hirsch irritating more often than not.  His character, in a film with a completely original premise, was sometimes far too conservative.  For a man who once blew up a laboratory, he’s strangely backward and ignorant, shouting blandly about “keeping the family together” when his son expresses an interest in making his own way as a musician.

Even if we understand that Arthur has become less “radical” in the past decade and cares deeply about his family, we don’t grasp why he’d be so bull-headed when conversing with his kids.  While Arthur and Annie seem to connect on a supremely loving and intellectual level in several well-written moments, Running on Empty rings false when Arthur cannot speak to Danny matter-of-factly about the future.  The scenes between Phoenix and Hirsch are the worst written and most overacted in the entire picture.  When Arthur changes his mind about his son’s future, there is no credible lead-up to his decision–and that’s a glaring mistake.

Yet, despite all this, Running on Empty is a film of very serious power.

Despite the fact that a few scenes in the picture are unnecessary and poorly scripted, the Phoenix and Lahti performances are two of the best of the 1980s.

If I were a director in 1988, there would’ve literally no other actor I would’ve trusted to play Danny Pope. We can see in River Phoenix’s subtle actions (facial and bodily movements, even) the conflict he faces every day, wondering whether he should move forward with his family or leave them behind to begin his own life, to realize his own talents.  He steps cautiously in most scenes and approaches every conversation quietly.

And Lahti, who is a supremely underrated actress, plays her character tough at first, but gradually, we see her sympathetic side shine through.  If Hirsch is too overbearing in some scenes, Lahti is brilliantly restrained when necessary, showing cold detachment in early scenes and changing into a more honest, emotional person later on.

Because Lumet has drawn such fine performances from his cast, we forgive the movie some weaknesses.  The last scene, which could induce guffaws in a lesser picture, hits the perfect emotional note because we’ve come to truly care about many of the film’s characters.

And at the center of the movie, River Phoenix gives the best, most nuanced performance of his career.  Above all, Running on Empty affirms that we lost a great star far too early.