"I just feel like I should have done more this summer...”
The Story:
As another school year looms, a group of kids (ranging from incoming high school freshman to a rising college senior) are spending the last gasps of summer vacation roaming suburban Michigan. Boys and girls alike are also gathering for sleepovers and parties, which find them all searching for companionship and adventure as night falls.
The Review:
The Review:
It looks like each generation is going to have their watershed coming-of-age ensemble film; Lucas started the trend with American Graffiti, which Linklater updated 20 years later with Dazed and Confused. The Myth of the American Sleepover has received much less fanfare, but it’s very much in the same vein, as it’s a timeless mediation on teenage angst and anxieties. One might argue it’s even a little bit more timeless; both Graffiti and Dazed are both irrecoverably tied to their decades (though, don’t get me wrong, each transcends them easily), but Sleepover doesn’t feel particularly tethered to the present day. There are some instances of contemporary music, and I’m sure these fashions probably qualify as “current,” but I don’t know that this film will end up being a time capsule for the year 2010.
But that’s okay because this isn’t exactly meant to be a zeitgeist of the American teen; instead, this feels like a natural successor to these type of coming-of-age drama, taking all of their themes and issues and rolling them into a distinct narrative. As such, you’ll find a lot of familiarity here; you’ve got a sort of multi-pierced wild child (Claire Soma) bouncing from party to party, into the arms of random guys throughout the day. She’s hardly a slut, as you can sense some kind of loneliness or desperation in Soma’s performance; she’s got this deceptively soft voice that masks her aggressiveness. She’s playing a freshman girl who is wise beyond her years, and I think the same can be said about most of the cast. Another standout is Amanda Bauer in the role of a sweet junior girl who gets embroiled in a conflict that proves high school drama doesn’t take a summer vacation; her performance is similarly understated, and, like so many of the characters in this film, you feel she’s learned something about herself by the end without any obvious spoken platitudes.
The guys in the film find themselves in similar predicaments. Marlon Morton also portrays a rising freshman who feels like the film’s hopeless romantic. He spends most of the film chasing down a mysterious blonde (an obvious homage to Toad in American Graffiti), but he eventually learns that girls aren’t nearly the enigma he’s made them out to be. His innocence is interesting, as he also finds himself infatuated with one of his friends’ older sister, who lets him watch her take a bath; so many films would play this as a broad, comedic moment, but director Mitchell keeps it reigned in, poignant, innocent, and mostly asexual. The moment feels less like a teenage peepshow and more like a boy attempting to uncover the mysteries of the opposite sex; the older sister is alluring, but, in the course of the night, he manages to move away from that sort of objectified curiosity. His male counterpart is about 7 years older; portrayed by Brett Jacobson, Scott is the rising college senior that’s just had his heart broken by his longtime girlfriend. He takes off to Ann Arbor, where he searches for a pair of twin sisters he once hung out with; during their time together, they manage to redefine the word “awkward.” You can sense that he has no real plan here; he may be the oldest character, but he’s just as lost, lonely, confused, and anxious about the future.
But the answer for all of these characters is some sort of companionship; we all face this, and Myth of the American Sleepover proves that it’s best faced in the company of someone that gets you on some level. This is such a smart, perceptive film that feels both somber and celebratory, both angst-ridden and carefree. It captures the transience that is that last summer weekend, a time that always symbolizes greater import in movies like this. Everyone’s slipping into some kind of anxieties, and the panoramic take reveals that this shit only gets worse as you get older. An air of nostalgia and loss of the innocence of real youth (actual childhood) hangs over the proceedings, as everyone here senses that they’ll never retrieve those perfectly carefree days.
Part of growing up is learning that life is hard, but the film rightfully doesn’t dwell on this; while it is a bit more somber and laid-back than its ancestors, Myth keeps a sense of light optimism in the end. There’s a great visual metaphor for this when a storm pops up during the night and quickly passes; that pretty much captures not only high school, but all of our various phases in life--they’re punctuated with clouds and chaos that soon give way to clear skies. The same can be said for the teen movie genre itself, which has been beset with a recent rough patch; The Myth of the American Sleepover rescues it from the tumult with pitch-perfect performances (I’ll be surprised if none of the cast here become stars in the future) and an ethereal grace that elegantly captures what it feels like to be alive as dawn breaks after a long night of adventure. (Brett G.)
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