a SIFF 2008 review
Powerful Teen an Energizing Journey
Hannah Bailey is smart and beautiful, but she’s also a bit of a depressive misfit far too worried about what others think. Other then his acne problem, Jake Tusing could be considered her male counterpart, the school’s resident nerdiest nerd dreaming a new year will bring him the girlfriend he’s always wanted.
Hannah Bailey in Paramount Vantage's American Teen
One thing is for certain, that girl won’t be blonde rich witch Megan Krizmanich. Ruling things from her ivory tower of popularity, this youngest daughter of a prominent surgeon has the whole world dangling at her feet, and she isn’t above leaving a few well placed high heeled footprints as reminders. Not that basketball star Colin Clemons needs any of those. He already knows his only way out of town is a scholarship, his barely solvent father struggling to make ends meet so the idea that he could help with college tuition isn’t close to a real possibility.
It sounds like the setup for your typical High School comedy, but American Teen is live, not Memorex, this year-in-the-life of four Indiana teenagers trying to make it through their last year of school as brilliant and as emotionally profound a documentary as I’ll ever see. Director Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture) spent ten months with her subjects, the highs, lows and gloriously uncomforting in-betweens of growing up all on display in all their sometimes over-familiar glory.
I admit it. I saw the trailers for this and thought it was going to be some MTV-style “Real World” or “The Hills” clone stylized and edited to be the glossiest piece of fake reality this side of Bridget, Holly and Kendra’s platinum hair. The movie looked for all intents and purposes as trash, and to my embarrassment I judged it as such long before I got the opportunity to sit inside a theater and view it for myself.
Embarrassed because, not only is American Teen one of the more honest and insightful documentaries of teenage life I’ve seen this side of Hoop Dreams, it’s also so freakishly entertaining I really didn’t want to see it end. I knew these kids in school, could even be accused of being them at times in my day, and watching them try and deal with all the crazy mixed-up screwiness growing up entails infatuated and moved me like virtually nothing else this year.
Listen, stereotypes exist for a reason, and sometimes seeing how their manufactured, nurtured and proliferated can go along way towards seeing them destroyed. In High School, dealing with all those never-ending questions of who you are and what your place in the world will be can lead kids to places they were never meant to go. Whether we want to admit it or not, all of us have moved from one clique or another during our day, and whether we were nerd, heartthrob, jock, geek or Miss Popularity herself all of us know exactly what it’s like to be outside the glass window aching to be let in.
It goes without saying the kid I related to most was Bailey. She’s a film snob looking to make something of her life away from her hometown and out of the comfortable safety net of her parents. I knew who she was, understood the things she was looking for, and while I was never quite the outcast she is (to be perfectly honest, thanks to my athletic ability I tended to run with the in-crowd – for whatever good that did me) I definitely felt every little thing she’s going through.
But Burstein manages to do this for all the kids, each of them exploding outside of their cliché societal definitions to become as unique and as complicated as any other random person walking down the street. If anything, by the time all was said and done I wanted to know more about them, wanted to see the next steps in their young adult ladder. The movie made me infatuated with their stories, almost obsessed with seeing them break out of their bubbles and succeed, a part of me thinking that the more I got to know about them the more I’d maybe learn about myself.
Every teenage generation thinks they have it worse than their parents did. Every generation feels they’ve got more pressure and problems staring them in the face. Maybe that’s true on some level (goodness knows I wouldn’t have wanted some of my High School antics uploaded to YouTube for everyone in the world to see), but the reality is that people are people, and the spellbinding crazy messed-up puzzle box labeled adolescence is as weirdly mystifying now as it ever was in my or my parent’s or my parent’s parents days.
That American Teen knows and understands this isn’t terribly surprising. That it shows it in such dynamic and energizing detail is. I say see it today and be reminded of where we came from, what it took to get here and how much further we’ve got to go. For better or for worse, like all of our High School memories this one’s a classic.
Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)
Additional Links:
- Interview with director Nanette Burstein by Sara Michelle Fetters
- 2008 SIFF Blog by Sara Michelle Fetters
- 2008 Seattle International Film Festival Home Page
- American Teen Theatrical Trailer
