teenage
wasteland:
kids
clueless |
director
Larry Clark
screenwriter
Harmony Korine
story
by
Larry Clark
Harmony Korine
Leo Fitzpatrick
Jim Lewis
producers
Cary Woods
Justin Pierce
cinematographer
Eric Alan Edwards
music
Lou Barlow
John Davis
editor
Christopher Tellefsen
cast
Leo Fitzpatrick (Telly)
Justin Pierce (Casper)
Chloe Sevigny (Jennie)
Yakira Peguero (Darcy)
Rosario Dawson (Ruby)
mpaa rating: none
running
time: 91m
u.s.
release: 7/28/95
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other larry
clark films
reviewed on this website:
- ken
park
see also:
- gummo
director/screenwriter
Amy Heckerling
producers
Scott Rudin
Robert Lawrence
cinematographer
Bill Pope
music
David Kitay
editor
Debra Chiate
cast
Alicia Silverstone (Cher)
Paul Rudd (Josh)
Brittany Murphy (Tai)
Stacey Dash (Dionne)
Dan Hedaya (Cher's Dad)
Wallace Shawn (Mr. Hall)
Breckin Meyer (Travis)
Justin Walker (Christian)
Jeremy Sisto (Elton)
Dicky Barrett (Himself)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 97m
u.s.
release: 7/19/95
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
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Like most movies that come
wrapped in controversy, Kids doesn't quite deliver. The
first-time director, Larry Clark, is rather like his protagonist:
He comes on to you, has his rough way with you, and leaves you
feeling empty and violated. I'm not writing this in an offended
mood of high outrage. I wish I were. Kids is too dramatically
listless, too artfully artless, to be truly offensive. Its single-minded,
unblinking devotion to New York squalor is admirable to a point,
but past that point you don't know why you're watching these
skateboarder teen wolves or the brainless girls who passively
spread their legs for them. The moments of genuine power are
few and very far between.
Clark, a noted photographer with a taste for youthful dissipation
and degradation, has said he originally set out to make a video
about skateboarders; while hanging out with them, he met the
19-year-old Harmony Korine, who put together a script with the
most tenuous of narrative threads. The central character, 17-year-old
Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), is a "virgin surgeon" whose
hobby is deflowering girls barely out of puberty. We meet one
of his past conquests, Jennie (Chloe Sevigny), who has just tested
positive for HIV. She spends the movie trying to find Telly and
brief him on her condition, because he's the only boy she's ever
slept with. Meanwhile, Telly zeroes in on another virgin, the
sweet-faced, relatively innocent Darcy (Yakira Peguero). Then
there's Telly's stoned-out buddy Casper (Justin Pierce), himself
a virgin, though of course obscenely boastful about all the "bitches"
he's bagged. He wakes up after the film's climactic party and,
in one desperate and repugnant act, brings the plot full circle.
Harmony Korine's raw-slice-of-life screenplay has a commercial
eye: It has that cheap suspense mechanism at its core -- will
Jennie stop Telly in time to save Darcy? -- and it has an ironic,
literary symmetry beloved by young writers. Plus it has random
spasms of sex and violence to keep our interest. Critics are
calling this a daring movie.
I have nothing against depressing films. They can be cleansing,
cathartic, and oddly comforting; the comfort derives from watching
characters worse off than we are. But Kids, which purports
to show the way things are, has nothing much to say about
the way things are. Clark's quasi-documentary viewpoint is as
limited as the kids' consciousness. And he's definitely a photographer,
not a director. During the party scene, the camera sits stranded
in front of four prepubescent boys parked on a couch, passing
a joint back and forth. They're a pictorial study in decline,
a free-floating Mount Rushmore image. The other kids serve the
same iconic purpose, like Calvin Klein ads selling Clark's muted,
alarmist vision of oblivion.
Whom is Kids for? Probably not for the audience Clark
hopes to reach -- the kids who might supposedly be shown the
error of their ways. (Clark has described Kids as "a
cautionary tale.") The MPAA originally gave the movie an
NC-17 rating, which would have pushed it off-limits to those
under 17 whether or not they were "accompanied by a parent
or adult guardian." But Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the brothers
behind Kids' distributor Miramax, knew that the Disney-owned
Miramax couldn't put out an adults-only film -- not after the
flap over Miramax's Priest. So the Weinsteins bought the
rights, created the one-shot company Shining Excalibur, and is
releasing Kids under that label, and without a rating.
This now means that kids can see it with their parents, but is
that likely? The few parents who wouldn't be mortified sitting
next to their children at this movie would probably fail in their
attempts to get their kids to accompany them to "a cautionary
tale." (And what kid would want to sit through the earnest
parental discussion afterward?) Kids, then, is for adults,
and, more specifically, for hip Gen-Xers who want to prove that
nothing shocks them. But Kids isn't shocking -- not nearly
as much as Hector Babenco's Pixote, or Luis Buñuel's
Los Olvidados (which is 45 years old!).
All right: Unlike the kids in those films, Clark's kids aren't
murderers -- at least not consciously. But hasn't anyone noticed
the dodgy contradictions in what Larry Clark says about his movie?
Out of one side of his mouth, he comes on like a moralizer performing
a public service ("Parents should see it with their kids");
out of the other side, he seems to back away from that, perhaps
afraid to make Kids sound like an art-house Reefer
Madness. Clark is both a 52-year-old concerned parent of
two and an outlaw artiste clinging to his street cred.
The movie itself reveals Clark's prurient interest in the ways
these kids kill themselves. The mechanical zombie sex, the arrogantly
open drug use (the kids smoke huge blunts in the park, as if
getting busted weren't even a remote possibility) -- it's all
part of Clark's hip loser aesthetic. Nobody on the screen has
any aspirations aside from getting high or getting laid. It's
a reductive vision and, at its core, a conservative one. Kids
is like Porky's directed by Richard Avedon: crude yet
slick, a sexualized turn-off.
The movie is an itchy blanket of nihilism thrown over us. The
audience, on the lookout for anything entertaining, laughs in
disbelief at Telly's come-ons and appalling blow-by-blow accounts
of his sexual triumphs. Outside the theater, disgusted young
women couldn't stop talking about how they would never
have fallen for such rancid come-ons; their male companions,
knowing they wouldn't be getting any that night, kept a respectful,
shamefaced distance. (This is not, to put it mildly, a date movie.)
Kids invites disdain for its characters, not understanding.
Some of the come-on stuff is funny, in a low way. Another boy,
squirming in helpless desire to get into some girl's pants, tries
to win her over by promising her the moon: "I'll take you
out to dinner .... I'll give you some food, buy you a corn dog."
For variety, there are gross-out scenes: Casper dips a tampon
into juice and sucks on it; a guy sitting passed-out next to
a toilet gets pissed on.
Clark wants us to react. But what exactly does our reaction add
up to? Impotent despair at the state of urban youth? The movie
will probably attract neither the kids who most need whatever
"lesson" it affords (they're waiting for the next Batman
movie or horror movie) nor the older people in a position to
make institutional changes (The Bridges of Madison County
is more their speed). Kids, I'm afraid, is the latest
trendy grunge event, all candor and no insight, designed to make
college-age, middle-class city audiences feel as though they've
walked on the wild side. And the kids (as they also were in another
overpraised teens-from-hell drama, River's Edge) are so
blank that you don't care about them -- with the possible exception
of Darcy (played appealingly by Yakira Peguero), who is Harmony
Korine's update of the maiden whose purity is endangered. (Korine's
knight in shining armor is Jennie, I guess, but she's a singularly
ineffectual knight.) You respond to these kids in a detached,
abstract way -- you're supposed to be appalled at the idea
of them. Kids is a horror movie for people who want to
think the worst. But at the end, when the shaken Casper croaks
"Jesus Christ, what happened?", there's no answer because
we don't really know what drove him to do what he does. Artists
too often shame us into accepting sketchy motivation as ambiguity.
For Kids to be as disturbing as it wants to be, we'd have
to feel the boy's goatish lust, the girls' self-loathing sexual
passivity (these harsh, meaningless bangs may be the only attention
they get). Larry Clark doesn't get inside his kids' heads. He
just films their bodies, records their leering voices, then stands
back and calls it a portrait.
At
the beginning of Clueless,
our heroine, the 15-year-old 90210 princess Cher (Alicia Silverstone),
selects her day's outfit from the graphics on a computer screen,
which not only shows her what matches but how each outfit will
look on her. It's as if this powerful technology existed only
to help Cher look fabulous for school. (We never see her use
the computer for anything else.) Clueless, the best light-as-air
teen comedy in ages, is full of little spins like that, and when
I wasn't laughing I was at least smiling. The writer-director,
Amy Heckerling, who's 41 now, made her debut with the preternaturally
charming Fast Times at Ridgemont High; she still hasn't
lost touch with what makes mall-rats tick, even if some of the
jargon in Clueless is dated. (On Fast Times, Heckerling
had help from Cameron Crowe.)
Amy Heckerling's gift as a director -- which can't be faked,
and which is in short supply in current American movies -- is
a deep affection for her subjects. She may aim satirical arrows
at Cher and her bubbly friends, but the arrows have suction cups
on their tips. Heckerling doesn't skewer these kids for who they
are; she sees the unconscious (almost preconscious) humor in
their indomitable cluelessness. (The movie's deadpan irony about
its own giddy, pastel lightness is what The
Brady Bunch Movie tried for and missed.) Without Heckerling's
gentle amusement, the movie would either be a straight glorification
of airheads (like most of Fast Times' rip-offs) or a bitter
spray of venom like Heathers, which, in its refusal to
acknowledge the humanity in the Heathers or the jocks, wasn't
half as clever or original as it thought it was. Put it this
way: I couldn't stand kids like Cher in high school, but Heckerling
(and Silverstone) won me over, whereas Heathers merely
pandered to my adolescent anti-prom streak.
Alicia Silverstone didn't much impress me in her debut, as the
lethal Lolita in the inept The Crush
(1993), where she tried to be diabolical but was just pouty and
amateurish. I skipped her next feature (Hideaway) and
somehow missed her famous Aerosmith videos, so I can't say whether
her fine comic touch in Clueless is part of a gradual
advance, or a quantum leap, or (as I suspect) more a matter of
her performing within her range. She has wonderful eyebrows that
curl up in puzzlement or romantic anguish, and she gives Cher
(who's still a virgin) an appealing imperviousness. Cher is just
as forthright with her gruff but harmless dad (Dan Hedaya) as
she is with a bland hunk who makes a move on her. And she won't
be swayed by peer pressure; Cher, the most popular girl at school,
is above peer pressure -- she sets the standards.
Heckerling has assembled a terrific supporting cast. When Cher
takes the podium in debate class and holds forth on how we should
make room for Haitian refugees because "there's no RSVP
on the Statue of Liberty," the scene is funny, but Wallace
Shawn, as the teacher, turns it into a classic with his stupefied
"Have we fallen this far?" expression. Stacey Dash
has some fresh moments as Cher's best friend Dionne, who yells
at her goofy boyfriend but also has a warm rapport with him "when
nobody's looking." As the new girl Tai, who becomes Cher's
makeover "project," Brittany Murphy could be Marisa
Tomei's stoned baby sister; she has a natural rhythm, as if her
lines had just popped into her head and surprised her.
The male-written Fast Times took a dimmer view of guys
than Clueless does, perhaps because Cameron Crowe was
privy to guys' crude talk about girls. Heckerling gives guys
their due. As the smooth Christian, whom Cher has a crush on,
Justin Walker has a great bit when he politely escorts Cher to
a dance, only to forget about her when he spots a cute guy to
dance with. (Cher takes this revelation in stride -- Christian
becomes a cool guy to shop with.) The real find may be Paul Rudd
as Cher's stepbrother Josh, who listens to "complaint rock"
(his theme song is Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees"),
pores over Nietzsche, and spars good-naturedly with Cher. Rudd
is the spokesperson for those in the audience who find Cher appealing
but mildly ridiculous, and he's very winning. Heckerling handles
her young cast with a light, easy touch; watching them, you remember
what a great ensemble Fast Times had. (Clueless
has its own Jeff Spicoli, a stoner skateboarder who serves as
a relaxed and inadvertent counterpoint to the stoner skateboarders
in Kids. This being the '90s, the stoner becomes a twelve-stepper.)
Back in 1982, the sexual frankness of Fast Times upset
a lot of (adult) critics -- in some surface ways, it was the
Kids of its day. The scene in which Phoebe Cates instructed
Jennifer Jason Leigh in matters of fellatio ("Don't bite")
said more than a thousand sociological studies: Those kids, with
precious little guidance at home, had to steer each other (and
themselves) past the pitfalls of budding sexuality. Neither Fast
Times nor Clueless turn adults into cartoon ogres
(a key point of departure between Heckerling and the perpetually
snotty John Hughes), but they do recognize that the financial
realities of the last quarter-century have left kids almost entirely
to their own devices. Larry Clark paints this adultless world
as an apocalypse of immorality and irresponsibility; Heckerling
is more sanguine. She knows most kids stumble and fall, but also
help each other up and generally turn out okay.
Clueless is softer than Fast Times. There's no
hellish-devirginizing scene, no abortion, not much in the way
of drugs (Cher takes a few hits of weed but believes in moderation);
it's essentially asexual. What Heckerling achieves in Clueless
is a self-contained fantasyland full of colorful, smartly observed
people, who, for all their pastel poppiness, are more real to
us than the human wreckage in Kids. The irony for me is
that normally I'd be praising the depressing drama and panning
the light teen comedy. But Heckerling is a real director, and
her best movies are comedies of companionship and kindness. Clueless
is a happy bubble, and Alicia Silverstone comes into her own
as a confident young comedienne. She never pushes you to like
her; you just do. The same is true of the movie.
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