When I was 21 I found Baumbach’s take on life after
college to be spot on witty and accurate in its depiction of both college life
and the great unknown that looms for undergrad seniors. Many years later, the
film has lost something for me. As a young man I aspired to be the characters
in this film, despite the fact that they have no direction and do nothing with
their lives at 22. That didn’t matter to me. They talked and acted smart and
said funny things and behaved like they might remain 22 forever. Now well into
my 30s, the film mainly retains an element of nostalgia. It makes me think
about my college days, which I suppose is part of what Baumbach wants.
The four friends are Grover (Josh Hamilton), Max (Eigeman),
Skippy (Jason Wiles), and Otis (Carlos Jacott). It’s hard to discern why
they’re friends with each other except that they go to college together. They
don’t seem to have too much in common except a knack for intellectual
bullshitting. And as is pointed out a couple of times, they all talk the same.
Small liberal arts colleges tend to draw students of a certain type. Mine
certainly did. Inasmuch as my college loved to preach diversity, the truth is
that we were a rather homogenous group of undergrads.
Noah Baumbach went to Vassar College, a school not unlike
the one I attended. I had the chance to visit Vassar a few times while my older
brother was a student there. From the limited knowledge I have of the place,
it’s clear Baumbach based his fictional college on his real life alma mater.
It’s a land full of offbeat characters like the guy who goes around hugging
everyone; the European student who seems more sophisticated than everyone else,
especially when he’s standing nude reciting poetry in a dorm room; and an older
student named Chet – and played by Eric Stoltz – now in his tenth year at the
school. He works in a local bar and has all the inside info on the best classes
and best professors – because he’s taken just about every course.
To many people, Chet’s situation probably sounds like a
bit of a nightmare. But to a 22 year old about to get that diploma, the idea of
staying in school forever doesn’t always seem so bad. I have great memories of
my college years. It was a time of studying, learning, growing up, and (sort
of) learning how to cope with the world. I often wish I could return to
studying now. Chet is the epitome of that wish fulfillment. He’s not a sad
character. He’s got it figured out.
It’s the other four guys who are the sad characters.
Skippy enrolls in classes for two reasons: he feels he didn’t take advantage of
what the college had to offer before he graduated; and his girlfriend Miami
(Parker Posey) is a senior. Max and Grover rent a house near campus because
they just aren’t ready to fend for themselves. Otis defers his graduate school
admission to stick around too. The film is broken up into segments labeled with
such scholastic headings as “Midterms,” “Christmas Vacation,” and “Finals.”
When four years of your life revolve around these kinds of natural breaks,
where summer and Christmas vacations are periods of time that wrest you from
your true home and your life is defined by the academic year, you continue to
think in those terms even after they no longer have any meaning for you.
Grover might be the saddest of all because Jane (Olivia
D’Abo), his senior year girlfriend, has left for Prague to pursue her interest
in creative writing. He thought they’d be living together in Brooklyn after
graduation. That she is moving on with life and having new experiences only
exacerbates Grover’s feelings of stasis. So he sits around campus bars drinking
Scotch and smoking cigarettes – affectations he picked up while in college. He
finds undergraduate coeds to sleep with and listens to his father (an equally
dour Elliott Gould) psychoanalyze various players on the New York Knicks as
well as their then coach Pat Riley. Even Grover’s parents were in a kind of
holding pattern while Grover was in college and now that he’s finished they’ve
decided to separate. What is a 22 year old supposed to do with that
information? And does he really want to listen to his dad talk to him about
having to go back to using condoms and sleeping with other women. “I’m not
quite ready to accept you as a human being,” Grover bluntly tells him.
Kicking and
Screaming is likely to appeal to the niche market of people who went to
overpriced private liberal arts colleges. If your idea of a good time is
sitting around in a diner or a bar with friends discussing books and
philosophy, then this might be a movie for you. In the end, Grover tries for
spontaneity to inject some energy into his life, but he discovers that life
after college requires better planning. After all is said and done, all he has
to remind himself of his college years (the best years of his life, perhaps?)
are his memories – those flashbacks that show us the development of his
relationship with Jane. That’s all any of us have really. And I wonder if you
really sit down and talk with my old classmates, would they ultimately admit to
maybe thinking a little too often and too wistfully about those days as well?
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