Sophsitication, wit, and charm abound in Noah Baumbach's directorial debut, Kicking and Screaming. It's a movie about life. It's a movie about love. It's a movie about growing up. It's not about growing up in the childhood sense, but growing up as in maturing into true adulthood, post schooling. Kicking and Screaming is an ensemble film about a group of friends who have just graduated college and are now forced to take the next steps in their lives as they emerge into the real world. Some of them cope better than others, but they all struggle to find meaning in a post scholastic existence where they aren't quite sure what will become of them. The film is a sort of stream of consciousness, almost rambling foray into adult life in which we must make something of ourselves. It is a smart film, it is a sophisticated film, but it's almost too smart for its own good.
We learn a few key things from Kicking and Screaming. One. Noah Baumbach is a smart guy who knows how to write and has a keen sense of reality and what makes us human. Two. He may be too smart to make a coherent and entertaining story about human interaction and psychology. And three. Having so many things on one's plate is overwhelming and it causes a film to lose all sense of purpose. Baumbach tackles a lot of subjects with Kicking and Screaming, but they sort of all run into each other and get tangled up with one another that this film loses its direction starts to feel less and less like a film and more like an astute psychological study that lacks any real emotion.
I feel like the characters in Kicking and Screaming aren't as much human as they are simply vehicles for Baumbach to exemplify offbeat quirks and complex relationships. He's created very diverse and very smart characters, but they don't connect on the emotional level that is necessary for this film to work. Baumbach obviously knows what he is doing with this film but he barely misses the mark, only by throwing in too many quirks and too many off kilter personality traits that turn these characters into test subjects instead of humans. That being said, I enjoyed this film for its intelligence and integrity, but the flaws are there and they hold back the film from being really great. Kicking and Screaming would make a great psychological research paper that detailed hypothetical situations and closely examined the human interaction in these situations but, as a film, it lacks the extra step that makes the art of cinema something more than a research paper can accomplish.
You can't diss anybody in this film for what they accomplish. I have lots of respect for the keen awareness Noah Baumbach displays about life in this film. It is certainly a good film and it is smarter than the average dribble we see today, but it's far from perfect. It isn't something I would watch again, but I don't regret checking it out for its fascinating sophisticated qualities.
We learn a few key things from Kicking and Screaming. One. Noah Baumbach is a smart guy who knows how to write and has a keen sense of reality and what makes us human. Two. He may be too smart to make a coherent and entertaining story about human interaction and psychology. And three. Having so many things on one's plate is overwhelming and it causes a film to lose all sense of purpose. Baumbach tackles a lot of subjects with Kicking and Screaming, but they sort of all run into each other and get tangled up with one another that this film loses its direction starts to feel less and less like a film and more like an astute psychological study that lacks any real emotion.
I feel like the characters in Kicking and Screaming aren't as much human as they are simply vehicles for Baumbach to exemplify offbeat quirks and complex relationships. He's created very diverse and very smart characters, but they don't connect on the emotional level that is necessary for this film to work. Baumbach obviously knows what he is doing with this film but he barely misses the mark, only by throwing in too many quirks and too many off kilter personality traits that turn these characters into test subjects instead of humans. That being said, I enjoyed this film for its intelligence and integrity, but the flaws are there and they hold back the film from being really great. Kicking and Screaming would make a great psychological research paper that detailed hypothetical situations and closely examined the human interaction in these situations but, as a film, it lacks the extra step that makes the art of cinema something more than a research paper can accomplish.
You can't diss anybody in this film for what they accomplish. I have lots of respect for the keen awareness Noah Baumbach displays about life in this film. It is certainly a good film and it is smarter than the average dribble we see today, but it's far from perfect. It isn't something I would watch again, but I don't regret checking it out for its fascinating sophisticated qualities.