m o v i e s | " s u b U r b i a "
![[Post-teenage wasteland]](suburbia970207.gif)
For the dead-end kids in "Suburbia," a rock
star's return offers a chance at escape.
Directed by Richard Linklater | With Giovanni Ribisi, Steve Zahn and Parker Posey
"we gotta get out of this place" is more than just a refrain from an old Animals song. It's been the theme of small-town drama for well over a century. When Jeff, the philosophical kid at the heart of Richard Linklater's new film "Suburbia," exclaims to his friends that in 50 years they'll all be dead and forgotten, and therefore everything is futile, he's practically quoting Chekhov.
Of course, he doesn't know that (though you kind of suspect the filmmakers do). He and his friends are doomed to reenact the same rebellions and defeats that millions of aimless, yearning young people before and after them have experienced. Even their protests and insights are retreads. Yet all teenagers or post-teenagers — certainly all the characters in "Suburbia" — harbor this deep, defiant conviction: "I AM UNIQUE!"
One of the points made by "Suburbia" is that the deadening sameness of the '90s middle-American landscape — chronicled before the film's credits in long slow pans of decrepit condo complexes, "Everything 99 Cents" stores, McDonald's-laden strips and carelessly thrown-up tract housing — prematurely throttles teenagers' escape mechanisms. What good is running away if every town looks the same?
"Suburbia's" characters hang out together by the dumpster at the side of the local convenience store. It seems to be the only public space available, although it's actually store property, and the irritated Pakistani clerk periodically appears to shoo the kids away. When one of the guys announces to the clerk that he's moving off to L.A., the man's laugh-line retort — "They have many convenience stores there for you to stand in front of" — lands a paralyzing punch.
"Suburbia" is based on monologuist Eric Bogosian's off-Broadway play of the same name, and it's built around a structure familiar from previous Linklater films like "Slackers," "Dazed and Confused" and "Before Sunrise": following a group of characters through nights of joy-riding, soul-searching and intermittent debauchery to a coolly indifferent but invariably new dawn. Jeff (Giovanni Ribisi), his would-be artist girlfriend Sooze (Amie Carey), Air Force dropout Tim (Nicky Katt), manic airhead Buff (Steve Zahn) and quiet Bee-Bee (Dina Spybey) have gathered at "the Corner" to await a visit from their high school mate Pony (Jayce Bartok). Pony, who'd left to join a rock band a year before, returns as an MTV star in a stretch limo, with a decked-out publicist (Parker Posey) in tow, to slum with his old chums.
It's easy to make fun of truly awful rockers and worthless music. In its portrait of Pony, "Suburbia" achieves the more difficult stunt of being merciless toward mere mediocrity. Pony, who looks a lot like Matthew Sweet, delivers lines like "The road's hell, man" and "You guys are real — you live your lives — it's simple" as if nobody had ever said them before. He whips out a guitar, strums an utterly forgettable tune, and warbles
To the kids he left behind, Pony's attraction lies in the simple fact of his escape and the casual work offers he dangles before them — of doing an album cover or a video or writing songs together. If music as generic as his can serve as a ticket to Elsewhere, maybe so could Sooze's ludicrous performance-art thesis, "Burger Manifesto Part One — the Dialectical Exposition of Testosterone," or Buff's inane noodlings with a camcorder. As Jeff can't quite seem to figure out, the only way to guarantee failure in today's pop universe is to cling to harsh standards for yourself — or to insist on an unfashionable honesty before you've earned enough money to back it up.
Bogosian is known for his tough, angry vignettes of urban alienation, but in "Suburbia" he seems less comfortable with unrelieved darkness and more reliant on dramatic cliché. Linklater gets great performances from his young cast, and you'll find yourself thinking about the characters and their travails well after the movie's finish. But there's a flatness to "Suburbia's" texture that doesn't quite do justice to youthful energies, even those that are trapped in a strip-mall purgatory.
Dramas set in dead-end towns can move in only two directions: toward explosion or existential standoff. The name of "Suburbia's" town, Burnfield, points to the former, as does the gas meter on which the characters sit and brood or the handguns that periodically appear during the story. The movie begins and ends in a middle-American limbo — Beckett in burgerville. In between, it sets us up for a big tragic payoff in the grand tradition of '50s predecessors like "Rebel Without a Cause." But its subplots of xenophobic confrontations with the Pakistani storekeeper and possible murders and suicides ultimately lead nowhere. The paralysis of the conclusion doesn't feel illuminated by insight, as the filmmakers plainly intend, but rather simply exhausted.
The last word belongs to the Pakistani clerk: "You people are so stupid," he shouts at Jeff. "What's wrong with you? You throw it all away!" He doesn't understand why. Neither does Jeff. And "Suburbia" has fewer answers than its observant surface suggests. To "Suburbia" soundtrack album review
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