The second-coming-of-age movie

ADVENTURELAND. THE GRADUATE. No this is not a post about a new coming-of-age movie about a 16-year-old boy who just wants to be a normal kid, but in addition to having an overworked single mother and absent father, he know has to come to terms with saving the world from sin. Although now I am imaging the second-coming involved in all sorts of roles, like the obvious Saved! in a from a few years ago in a gender-reversal situation, or possibly just J.C. himself singing "Somebody to Love (eternally)" with the kids from Glee.

But I digress. One of the most common storytelling archetypes is the coming-of-age story and the trend continues in film -- including in very two different way in a couple of this year's most discussed offerings, An Education and Precious (I would suggest staying tuned to this station for more on these in the coming days). My topic here is a less common, younger sibling that I'm calling the second coming of age. If the first occurrence comes with a young person realizing he/she is struggling to become an adult, the second occurs generally when the protagonist realizes -- generally post-college -- the reverse, that the grown-up world is not all its cracked up to be and perhaps he/she is not prepared for the world of adulthood. Having been through that time, and having less-than-fulfilling work in the immediate years after school, the topic has a certain resonance and I think I would say I'm a pretty good judge of their accuracy. Perhaps you are the same way. I would argue that this phenomenon itself has been growing for our generation as a whole, which is why I find it surprising that not just the best movie, but the most relevant movie was made in the 1960s: The Graduate (trailer).

Honestly the point of this movie is to write about how great that movie is an how miserable I am that no film since has captured that topic as well. Granted it is probably unfair to compare other movies to Mike Nichol's classic. Although most famous for its Mrs. Robinson plotline, a career-making performance by Dustin Hoffman, and a memorable soundtrack, what elevates the film from being simply a well-made, clever film to a cultural touchstone is how accurately it captures the theme. Nichol astutely chose to cast Hoffman instead of a WASPish actor as the novel depicts and crafts the story of a young man discovering he is out of place in his own community, his own family, and his own life. He finds himself in the situation he does because he is so lost and although I was neither alive in the 1960s nor dated one of my parents' friends, I can feel a great sense of empathy for Benjamin. Without quality filmmaking, it could have crossed over that dangerous line from honest and engaging to earnest. The Graduate triumphs because it never wallows in Benjamin's situation -- instead of hearing him whine about feeling out of place, we get to see him jump into a swimming pool in a diving pool surrounded by his parents' friends on his birthday. There is an actual story that exposes the themes of the movie instead of allowing the setup of a struggling post-college man dictate the events. That's what makes the movie timeless and after seeing it for the first time a few years ago, I could have been sworn it was written about my generation, not one older than my parents'.

Which brings me to the recent film, Adventureland (trailer), that prompted this post. It focuses on the same time in a young man's life but otherwise shares little more than the protagonist's nearly crippling awkwardness. Like Benjamin, James (Jesse Eisenberg -- or as I have heard him described, the guy they get when they can't afford Michael Cera) has just graduated from college but instead of departing on an engaging storyline, we simply have him dumped in an amusement park with mildly amusing characters as he whines about his predicament and looks to possibly lose his virginity with that fang-banger girl, Kristen Stewart. Benjamin is a character lost because he doesn't know how to fit in once he has left college, whereas I found myself watching James' interactions and wondering how he was functional enough to survive college socially. What 22-year-old does not think it is going to be a problem to go out on a date with a girl from work while trying to date another coworker? Or tell a girl in the first 10 minutes of a date about his (lack of) sexual experience? Sure this movie might be functionally a comedy (one could say the same about The Graduate, though), but there are too many scenes -- especially the last -- where it unsuccessfully walks that Apatowian line of funny movie with an emotional core to fully discount its attempts to be something more meaningful.

If Adventureland moves too much toward comedy, perhaps a closer relative is Garden State (trailer), a more serious movie that was commonly compared to The Graduate following its 2004 release. I personally remember it most for being a lot better than I expected, although in all honesty I thought it was going to be McAwful. Essentially it is the same setup as the aforementioned films except that the main character has taken a longer hiatus from home -- a good portion of high school and then a mostly failed attempt at acting that puts him at his mid-20s, I think -- and touches on the contemporary issues of psychology and overmedication, not to mention grief. Zach Braff, who wrote, directed and starred, does an affable job at building a mood and a good collection of scenes, but so much of it is too convenient and comes across as a film-school attempt. Although in many ways not as outlandish as Benjamin's affair with Mrs. Robinson, so much of the movie seems much less believe and built around making us see Andrew's isolation. This comes to a head in the final scene as well that swerves way too far into melodrama.

Which brings me around to my final conclusion about The Graduate is that by being more detached emotionally from what happens to its main character, it tells a much better story. The final scene of that movie is one of the more memorable of its decade, unlike the other two movies that left me wondering if even the good parts of the movie were supposed to be a build-up to an overly emotional crescendo. Contemporary film -- both in the large-scale action movies and especially the smaller, independent movies -- have been marked this decade by an emphasis on realism, frequently by borrowing aspects of documentary films. This often results in a detachment of the morality or the emotion from the plotline and allows the viewers to make judgments instead of the dialogue and the triumphant music doing it for them. Right now would be a perfect time for The Graduate to have been made (originally -- I am not advocating a remake!) and perhaps that is why it feels much more contemporary than either of those more recent films.

Owen Talks TV

The good folks over at the The A.V. Club have compiled a list of the thirty best TV series of the past decade. At the least, I'm pleased to see my taste in TV by and large vindicated. As I've said before, the three best TV series, in my opinion, are Arrested Development, Lost, and Band of Brothers. The first two are in The A.V. Club's top ten (at number three and number eight, respectively); Band of Brothers is nowhere to be found, but my guess is that they were ranking only open-ended series, not mini-series like Band of Brothers. Other favorites that make the cut are Freaks and Geeks (four), Mad Men (five), The Office (both British, at seven, and American, at eleven), 30 Rock (thirteen), Futurama (fourteen), Firefly (seventeen), Tim and Eric (twenty), Curb Your Enthusiasm (twenty-one), Undeclared (twenty-three), The Venture Brothers (twenty-six), Flight of the Conchords (twenty-seven), and Eastbound and Down (twenty-eight).

The number-one series, The Wire, is one I've been meaning to look into for some time now. (When my Netflix queue is in the nineties as it is, it's a bit daunting to add a five-season series to that. It will happen, though.) There are other series on the list that I've given a shot but wasn't able to get that into. Foremost of those is The Sopranos (number two), which is tantamount to heresy among lovers of quality television. I watched every episode of the first two seasons, so I can't be accused of not giving it a try; but I found it a bit contrived, and most of the characters downright caricatural. I watched the first season of Deadwood (nine), thought it was fun (especially Al Swearengen) but never rose to greatness. I watched at least the first season (maybe some of the second, I can't remember) of Six Feet Under (twenty-two), but found it a bit precious and hard to buy into; it didn't help that many of the main characters seemed like tired, broadly drawn stereotypes (the tight-laced housewife, the rebellious teenager, the contrasting obedient "good son" and free-spirited "bad son," etc.).

Something that struck me about the list is the networks that showed them. Half were on cable, and eight were on HBO alone. Among the broadcast networks, NBC and Fox led the pack with five and four shows, respectively. With a few ambitious exceptions (Lost, Firefly, The West Wing), the broadcast networks' quality shows were mostly relatively inexpensive comedies. I think this just goes to show the extent to which cable networks—first HBO, now AMC, FX, and Showtime as well—have come to dominate TV drama. Maybe it has to do with penny-pinching broadcast networks' increasing reliance on cheap reality and game shows, leaving a slack in the realm of high-quality drama that the cable networks have picked up. Not only that, but cable networks are able to focus their resources on a dozen or so episodes per season of a handful of shows, instead of having to produce several hours of programming every day for shows, each of whose seasons are usually at least two dozen episodes long (barring screenwriters' strikes, etc.). (On the other hand, maybe the distinction I've drawn between cable networks and broadcast networks is anachronistic, given that for some time now just about everyone in this country—excepting my parents, stubborn cable-free stalwarts that they are—has cable, and NBC, ABC, and Fox might very well be right next to HBO, AMC, and The Cartoon Network on the dial.)

The main thing that The A.V. Club's list demonstrates is that the past ten years have been a golden age of television. The medium has gone from being cinema's ugly cousin to a (perhaps the) recognized home of legitimate, high-quality acting and storytelling. Previously, a TV star only made it really big when he or she started making films; during the '00s ("the aughts"?), many established film actors (Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Salma Hayek, Keith Carradine, Bill Paxton, Steve Buscemi, just going by the shows on the list) took roles on TV, a move no longer seen as a step down careerwise. I think we should expect this trend only to continue in the future and to increase the quality and ambition of the programming, as more cable networks get in on the game HBO started.

One final thought: According to this list, Jason Segel may be the greatest television actor of the decade, with roles on Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, and How I Met Your Mother (number eighteen). Just doing the math, he's apparently a mighty TV force to be reckoned with. Who knew?

Best Date Movie Ever

ANTICHRIST

It's been about two weeks since I saw Lars von Trier's latest, most controversial film (trailer and clip), and I have to admit I haven't made a lot of headway in wrapping my head around it or parsing its many elements. (Not to point any fingers *ahem* but it hasn't helped that I haven't had anyone else to discuss it with.) So don't expect too much in the way of full-fledged analysis or brilliant insights here; I'll be the first to admit that with this film, I'm pretty far in over my head. I may not have really understood Antichrist, but I was awestruck nevertheless.

The film begins—its "prologue" is so similar stylistically to the opening sequence of The Fall, with its breathtakingly beautiful black-and-white photography of initially seemingly disparate images, shot in glacial slow-motion and silent except for its classical score (in Antichrist's case, Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga), that von Trier might need to worry about a call from Tarsem's lawyers—with a couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) passionately making love, while their toddler son escapes from his crib, climbs out an open window, and falls to his death. Months later, he seems to have come to terms with it, while she's still tormented by guilt and grief. A therapist, he's distrustful of her doctors and the medications they prescribe her and takes her emotional recovery upon himself; meanwhile, their marriage becomes increasingly strained, with their child's death bringing latent dissatisfactions and resentments to the surface. Insisting that she face her fears head-on in order to overcome them, he takes her to the place she says she fears the most: Eden, their isolated, rustic cabin in the woods. Once there, he has her undergo several tests and exercises in hopes of getting to the bottom of her feelings of guilt toward their son, her increasingly unstable (almost bipolar) feelings toward him, and her powerful, seemingly irrational fear of nature. (As she tells him at one point, chillingly dispassionately, almost as a non-sequitur, "Nature is Satan's church.")

Watching Antichrist, I was alternatingly entranced and repulsed. The cinematography is stunningly beautiful, especially of the woods surrounding Eden. Dafoe and Gainsbourg both deliver fantastic performances, particularly Gainsbourg (winner of the best-actress award at Cannes this year), who's at times coldly calm or indifferent, as if in shock, and at others bestially, ferociously passionate, with emotion pouring out from the depths of her soul. Thematically there's so much going on that I don't really know where to begin: gender, power, sexuality, guilt, fear, loss, revenge, violence, life and death, rationality, history, man in nature, man against nature, nature against man, fantasy and reality, archetypes, modernity, health, psychology, just for starters off the top of my head. A library's worth could be written about this film. It also doesn't flinch from depicting graphic violence and sex—in some cases at the same time. At times it was terrifying, gruesome, and pretty difficult to watch; that isn't a criticism, but puts in alongside other great, very unpleasant films like Requiem for a Dream, United 93, Funny Games, and Come and See.

A lot of the controversy surrounding Antichrist comes from its perceived misogyny, but that seems to be a somewhat simplistic take. It's true that the film's concerned with the differences, real or perceived, between men and women, and that in many ways the husband acts in a traditionally masculine fashion—rational, in control, methodological—while the wife acts in a traditionally feminine fashion—hyper-emotional, even hysterical at times, without the ability (or perhaps desire) to cordon off and set aside her feelings. But it would be a mistake simply to read the film as saying, "When men grieve for a dead child they're all like this, but when women grieve for a dead child they're all like this" (said like a bad stand-up comic). The wife ends up doing some pretty atrocious things to her husband and herself by the end of the film, but I can't really say yet that von Trier intended those things to be a condemnation of her or of women in general. (That's what keeps it from being an art-house torture-porn version of The Room; both von Trier and Wiseau made their films from an intensely personal, emotional place, but somehow I don't think von Trier made Antichrist to get back at a girl who'd dumped him.) I can't say I have a definite, or even vague, answer at this point, but there's just too much going on simply to write it all off as a woman-hating screed.

Though I may never muster the courage to watch it again, knowing now what I'd be getting myself into, Antichrist is certainly one of the best films of the year, and among the most beautiful, most challenging, and most frustrating I think I've ever seen. I've heard it described as von Trier's take on the horror genre; toward that end, he was able to imbue it with an unspoken sense of threat and foreboding long before the fantastical, bizarre, and gruesome events toward the end. (For instance, there's a very Lynchian shot, at the end of the scene early on of the husband visiting his wife at the hospital, that centers on the seemingly empty space between them and very slowly zooms in on the vase of flowers on the table beside her bed until the screen is filled with the green, murky water in the vase, as the monotonic score hums boomingly; very, inexplicably unsettling. Lynch is a master of making the mundane creepy; if you're going to borrow, borrow from the best.) I haven't seen much of von Trier's filmography, just Dancer in the Dark (trailer), another unpleasant film about which I found things both to like and dislike. Having seen Antichrist, I may have to man up and see some of his other films (about which I've heard good things, but which are supposed to be similarly hard on the audience); whatever the have in store for me, at this point I can't say I wasn't warned.