The film begins at a graduation party and introduces us to all the main characters. Grover (Josh Hamilton) and Jane (Olivia d’Abo), both of whom are literary majors who want to be writers, have been dating for the past year, but clearly their relationship has hit a stage of “emotional paralysis,” as she puts it, and is threatened by the fact that she is going overseas to Prague for the next year. Max (Chris Eigeman) is the group’s self-appointed grouch, guaranteed to find the negative side of everything, while Otis (Carlos Jacott) is the group’s worrier. “You have two emotions,” Max tells him. “Antsy and testy.” Finally, there’s Skippy (Jason Wiles), the group’s most naïve and overeager member who seems clueless that his girlfriend, Miami (Parker Posey), who still has a year left of college, seems to despise him. And somewhere on the perimeter is Chet (Eric Stoltz), who is mistaken at the party for an adult and for good reason: he’s been going to college for 10 years, struggling to finish his senior thesis (apparently, it’s entering it’s third volume).

These characters are simultaneously insufferable and charming. After all, one can indulge in only so much self-analysis before becoming a self-obsessed bore, but these characters tread that line very carefully. They differ from many movie characters their age because they are clearly and openly intelligent, even if they’re not very smart. These are characters who can discuss Kant, Keats, and Raymond Carver (not to mention name all the Friday the 13th movies), but at heart they’re petrified of life and have no idea how to tackle it, a central theme that is hilariously summarized in their tendency to duck down and hide whenever a particularly persuasive door-to-door salesman known as “the cookie man” comes knocking. They would rather lie on the floor and hide than face true adversity.

Kicking and Screaming is a comedy in the classic sense: it “aims at entertaining by the fidelity with which it presents life as we know it,” as one etymological dictionary put it. The film’s title is appropriate in that it derives from the idea that these characters will be dragged into full adulthood “kicking and screaming,” yet it’s amusingly misleading because the comedic tone and approach to the material is smart and low-key. The film is frequently funny as a direct result of its fine writing. Baumbach, working from a story he concocted with Oliver Berkman, a lifelong buddy with whom he attended Vassar, fills the scripts with memorable one-liners, but more importantly, with keen insights into his characters and their unstable place in life. It’s the kind of film that constantly makes you laugh, but without ever letting you forget about the ennui just under the surface.

Baumbach adds a level of poignancy to the story by including flashbacks to show how Grover and Jane met and came together. There are four of these flashbacks scattered carefully throughout the film, and they work precisely because Baumbach doesn’t go for the easy emotions. He uses them to show the slow, dawning realization that these characters are attracted to each other despite their starting out as antagonists (Jane is the only student to criticize Grover’s story in a writing class). There isn’t instant attraction or love at first sight, and we never even see them kiss. Yet, the moments they share together, which are sometimes awkward, sometimes sweet, make us rethink the opening scene and wonder exactly where it all went wrong.

Kicking and Screaming was one of several thematically and tonally similar “Generation X” comedies released during the early to mid-1990s, represented on the far indie side by Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) and on the far Hollywood side by Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites (1994). Baumbach’s film falls somewhere in the middle--a relatively modest effort by a first-time writer/director that was funded by a small studio (Trimark). The result is a polished film, but one that lacks that potentially strangling refinement of a full Hollywood production. Despite making some concessions (such as the creation of the Chet character just so Eric Stoltz, then an indie darling, would have a more prominent role), Baumbach stays true to his touching and funny vision of intelligent young adults who are smart enough to know that the comforts of adolescence are hard to give up.

Copyright ©2006 James Kendrick

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