Kicking and Screaming (1995)
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Kicking and Screaming Movie Review
Kicking and Screaming is a 1995 drama film directed by Noah Baumbach and starring Josh Hamilton among others. It’s a solid debut for the director.
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“How do you make God laugh?
Make a plan“
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Four college graduates avoid making real decisions about their futures. They refuse to move forward in their lives, each in their own unique way. When watching this movie, you can easily dissect that it was made by an emerging young talent. Baumbach was just 25 while making it, so this rang subject rang a bit too personal for him, lacking the remove and context that is somewhat necessary when tackling said subject.
Still, it was evident from the beginning that he would become a great indie director as his writing is particularly strong here. I am talking about the dialogue as the script is simple and meandering, though undeniably fitting the characters’ current roads in life. But each conversation is quite interesting and the movie’s stuck in time narrative was very intriguing to me.
It’s all about people who are lost after college and don’t know what to do next and what life awaits for them. In this emphasis on life and the passage of time, the film almost felt similar to something coming from Linklater himself, but the dialogue is very much Baumbach’s witty, smart and at times even obnoxiously pretentious.
Yes, these characters are rather insufferable. Kicking and Screaming features a cast of overly pretentious, annoying people whom you would not like to have in your vicinity. That goes without question. Yet, their obsession with overanalyzing anything did appeal to me as somebody who does that all the time myself. The characters are only okay in their development, but their relationships were well realized.
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The performances are nothing to write home about as the movie features a cast of unknowns or at least B-movie actors. I wasn’t familiar with either one of them. Josh Hamilton was pretty solid as basically the protagonist of the movie, but besides his looks, I wouldn’t say he has a lot of charisma. I felt the same for most actors here. The pacing is also slow and the film’s structure is rather poor as are the technical aspects overall.
Kicking and Screaming was a solid feature debut for Noah Baumbach. Its technical aspects and acting performances are nothing to write home about and the film is slow and meandering, but that approach fits the subject matter at hand as it’s after all about clueless recent college graduates. The dialogue is especially effective at conveying just how lost most of us are during this period in our lives.
My Rating – 3.5
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