Review: Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming on Criterion DVD

As one of Criterion’s more contemporary releases, it comes as little surprise that the film’s anamorphic widescreen image looks sharp.

Kicking and ScreamingTruthfulness doesn’t preclude unpleasantness, a point ably established by the films of Noah Baumbach, which reap dividends both engaging and grating from their upfront autobiographical authenticity. Beginning with his debut Kicking and Screaming and continuing throughout the uneven Mr. Jealousy and last year’s superb The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach has used his work to tackle the highly personal doubts, fears, and disappointments with which he’s currently struggling. Certainly, the director’s first feature-length effort, shot when he was only 25, feels torn from recently concluded experiences, charting the aimlessness and ennui of four insufferable, maturation-adverse college grads with a relaxed realism and sharp ear for the sarcasm and pop culture-infused dialogue that came to define many mid-1990s breakout indies (Clerks, Reality Bites, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan and Barcelona).

As in his later, equally literate output, Baumbach’s preoccupation is with the frustrations of those whose higher education affords them no greater insight into themselves or the larger world, a situation that his characters respond to in generally ill-advised ways, their discussions’ intermingling of the erudite (Kant, Keats) and the insignificant (Josie and the Pussycats, Friday the 13th) reflecting their central conflict between living up to the lofty expectations of their (upper-middle) class position and shunning such obligations in favor of wallowing in minor day-to-day and societal minutiae. Whereas Kevin Smith’s convenience store slackers talk about such TV and movie trivia because it’s the primary thing—nay, the only thing—they truly care about, Baumbach’s protagonists are too smart not to realize the avoidance games they’re playing, their self-analytical awareness making them more pitiful and, supposedly, more charmingly pathetic. Kicking and Screaming’s twentysomethings sidestep confrontation whenever possible: the guys cowardly lying on the floor to avoid a door-to-door cookie salesman; Max’s (Chris Eigman) advice that his teenage girlfriend should not piss off a redneck gentleman whose bumper sticker indicates that he’d rather be bow hunting; Otis’s (Carlos Jacott) decision to drink a beer with unidentifiable food floating on its surface rather than complain to the waitress.

Their fundamental aim, however, is to evade the future, an undertaking that goes hand in hand with a desire to canonize the immediate, as articulated by Max’s confession that “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday.” The second of these two objectives also drives Kicking and Screaming itself, though Baumbach’s interests extend past simply immortalizing the laidback vibe of hanging around with friends who should be doing something more productive, moving on to the more fertile ground of depicting the anxiety and anger of failed love, a topic plumbed via Grover’s (Josh Hamilton) anguished attempts to deal with the end of his relationship to Prague-bound ex Jane (Olivia d’Abo). The consciousness of their decision to postpone growing up eventually makes Grover and company infuriatingly obnoxious, their blasé-intellectual appeal nullified by either woe-is-me mopeyness (Grover, Otis) or cooler-than-thou arrogance (Max), the latter of which is compounded by the fact that Eigman—the decade’s poster boy for haughty surliness—remains one of the most singularly self-satisfied screen presences in the medium’s history.

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Yet Baumbach’s gift for crafting characters out of flesh and blood (such as Eric Stoltz’s perpetual student Chet) gives the film an associative realism, an I-know-these-people familiarity, which helps partially offset their irksomeness. And though his dialogue is often too pleased with its own cleverness, his script’s marriage of the literate and the lowbrow never comes across as excessively contrived and, such as with a background chat regarding a theoretical fight between Freddy and Jason, seems prophetic about mainstream movie culture’s Tarantino-accelerated devolution into solipsism. More remarkable about Kicking and Screaming, however, is Baumbach’s directorial minimalism, his long, graceful takes and sly employment of rock and country music bestowing the comedic and romantic proceedings with subtle sophistication, as in an emotionally well-calibrated scene between Grover and his maritally separating father (Elliot Gould), as well as a final, hopeful image whose heartfelt poignancy is—after the preceding onslaught of smart-alecky gibber-jabber—all the more powerful for being so unexpected.

Image/Sound

As one of Criterion’s more contemporary releases, it comes as little surprise that Kicking and Screaming’s anamorphic widescreen image looks sharp, with decent color saturation and a general lack of print blemishes. Black levels could be a bit better (the bar scenes lack some needed background clarity), but given Baumbach’s rather reserved aesthetic, the film’s okay-but-nothing-great video quality is perfectly in keeping with his intent. Similarly, the 5.1 audio is a thing of modest competence, delivering both the soundtrack’s Pixies and Bob Marley cuts, as well as its copious dialogue, with clarity.

Extras

Rather than take the commentary route, director Baumbach instead opts to discuss his debut via two new 2006 video interviews-one by himself, the other one a series of conversations between himself and stars Chris Eigeman, Josh Hamilton, and Carlos Jacott. Covering the story’s genesis, the means by which the filmmaker found his cast, the production, the marketing process, and the studio-mandated demand that the film feature a marketable star (ultimately Eric Stoltz), both features prove entertaining and reasonably substantial. The same can’t be said of some brief 1995 IFC TV interviews with the cast and crew, nor three deleted scenes which once again prove that such material has usually been deleted for a good reason. Conrad and Butler in “Conrad and Butler Take a Vacation”, a sorta-amusing 2000 short film directed by Baumbach and co-starring Jacott, as well as a theatrical trailer, are also included.

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Overall

The best of Chris Eigman’s mid-1990s efforts—an outcome due more to Noah Baumbach’s poised direction than to the actor’s typically irritating gloomy-sarcastic shtick.

Score: 
 Cast: Josh Hamilton, Chris Eigeman, Olivia d'Abo, Carlos Jacott, Jason Wiles, Parker Posey, Eric Stoltz  Director: Noah Baumbach  Screenwriter: Noah Baumbach  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 95 min  Rating: R  Year: 1995  Release Date: August 22, 2006  Buy: Video

Nick Schager

Nick Schager is the entertainment critic for The Daily Beast. His work has also appeared in Variety, Esquire, The Village Voice, and other publications.

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