Directed by Richard Linklater. Written by Eric Bogosian
The suburbs, fortress of the middle class, is a maligned plane of existence: A poorly put together purgatory of cookie-cutter houses through which a main drag of box stores and fast food joints runs like a central nervous system. Burnfield, where Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia unfolds, is such a place, no different from its endless iterations across America.
That’s the problem, says Jeff, played by Giovanni Ribisi. He’s a high school grad still living at home. Him and his friend gather most nights behind the local gas station to drink and shoot the shit, but he’s getting fed up with it. One day they’ll just be bones and dust, and some other saps will take their place. Another 50 years, and the pattern repeats. Ad nauseam, forever.
His friends don’t rally around the sentiment. Buff can’t wrap his head around any words longer than three syllables, and Tim’s failed stint in the Air Force has left him a cynical alcoholized punk that thinks himself above it all. Only person keen on breaking loose is Sooze, Jeff’s girlfriend, who wants to go make art in New York. So why isn’t Jeff thrilled and keen to leave everything behind and come with?
Life in the rut is easy to settle into because you can’t see over the sides, but when an old classmate who’s now a famous rock star rolls into town in his limo to check in with the gang, life gets thrown into sharp relief by the bright life of perceived success. Life in suburbia is due a reckoning, and Linklater’s movie based on Eric Bogosian’s adapted stage play is a bitter affair.
It’s a story of frustrated youth and a potent mix of Linklater’s trademark penchant for counterculture portraits and the downbeat vibes of going-nowhere malaise. As Buff, an all-time teen moron, Steve Zahn is a riot. A dingus of the highest order, his sense of humor is stealing garden gnomes and spraying beer from a can he holds in front of his crotch. Unapologetically enthusiastic about what tickles dopamine from his brain, he’s someone you wish you could check in on every so often. He’s the happy idiot among the disheartened.
Giovanni Ribisi’s nasal voice and disdainful eyes capture the conflict of a hurting boy whose insecurity traps him, and it’s a stark portrayal of someone fed up with what he knows and fearful of what he doesn’t. Internet forums today are thick with Jeffs gone bad, holding forth on society’s decay and why a particular strawman is to blame.
Together with insecure rockstar Pony (Jayce Bartok), his publicist Erica (Parker Posey), and verbose Sooze (Amie Carey) SubUrbia boasts a strong ensemble of quirky subculture characters that are crystallized to almost caricature-like effect. It’s hard to blame Linklater, but the quality of his cast makes him cut back and forth in their separate storylines, sucking the wind out of the movie’s sails at times. Good directing is knowing which storyline’s got the juice at a given moment, and Linklater doesn’t always.
Bogosian’s script retains classic theater elements of dialogue, which is highly combative and at times preachy. For a bunch of no-goodniks they sure have many opinions about how they see the world. Linklater’s remarkable depiction of this time and place combines with Bogosian’s script to create something of a perfect evocation of the frustrated ennui of a listless youth undergoing a slow spiritual death, only the realization sets in slowly. What begins in classic Linklater fashion as dudes hanging out and shooting the breeze about high and low turns into something much more charged and soon it’s hard to see any redemptive elements.
In a third act that’s meant to capitalize on the groundwork leading up to it, the story falters, and SubUrbia doesn’t go further to unpack its points, instead injecting some cheap drama into an already pervasive malaise. It’s a sign of a movie that doesn’t quite know what it wants in the end, be it boneheaded teen comedy, or an earnest expression of an aimless and disillusioned youth sedated by middle-class mass-monotony.
SubUrbia remains a well-executed performance that won’t let you peek behind the curtain, lest you find out the banality of its tricks, but it remains thoroughly enjoyable to remain in the company of Jeff, Erica, Buff and the gang as they needle each other and try to tease out meaning from the television static of their lives.
Mikkel Frederiksen 