Climbing Higher Pictures

So instead of Where the Wild Things Are, you’re going to have to live with both Youth and Revolt and The Imagninarium of Doctor Parnassus for reviews this week. Here is the former, a film not premiering until 2010. Does this cut resemble a comedy classic or a haphazard misfire in the vein of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Is it successful? Read on:

Youth In Revolt Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: B

You want my honest opinion? Ignore the letter grade. In this particular case, it isn’t even remotely helpful to you if you are deciding whether or not this film is worth seeing. Then why did I give it a B do you ask? Because there are parts of me that love this film, and there are other parts of me which passionately dislike it. Therefore, I can only justify giving it a middle-of-the-road grade, because when analyzed as a whole instead of as individual parts, a B was the only thing that made sense. Call it convenience, call it dodging my literary obligation towards fitting works of cinema into your high school’s academic grading system, but this is one of the most subjective experiences I’ve had watching a movie in quite some time.

A lot of it has to do with the writing of the film. The dialogue has a tenor and a delivery all its own, completely detached from what you or I would think of as reality. “Quirky” is the only word that really fits here, but even that is an absurd understatement. It revels in its oddity, and is quite standoffish towards allowing the viewer into its little universe, at least at first. After the opening 15 minutes or so, you accept the reality in front of you because of its strangeness, though it isn’t so distant as to exist completely for observation sake while also not being connected enough to have happened yesterday afternoon. The film includes brief sections of animation, achieved through various means, that act as bridges between settings and denote the passage of time, and the whole project feels sort of like it was cobbled together for a senior thesis film. That’s not to say that any of the ideas are bad or that anything isn’t achieved successfully, I’m just trying to convey the feeling of the movie, a feeling that will inevitably lead me to descriptive failure. You sort of have to see it to know what I’m talking about.

Michael Cera is the protagonist, and yes, he begins by playing the same character he’s played in every film he’s ever acted in. Here, however, his naïveté is heightened by the dialogue and by the alternative worldview around him, allowing him to push his persona even farther into the realm of awkwardness and cringe-inducing humor. He goes for broke this time, and I hope that after all this is over he’ll finally have gotten this individual out of his system.

What the film does afford him is the chance to actually spread his wings as an actor. In order to “get the girl”, Cera creates an alternative persona, François Dillinger, a chain-smoking asshole delinquent who is just horrible enough to get him kicked out of his mother’s house so he can go live with his Dad, who, through a series of manipulated steps, now resides close to his true love. The manipulative streak kicks in when he realizes that if he doesn’t try and take control of his own life, everything he actually wants will blow on by him, and Cera’s portrayal of Dillinger is wonderful in its freshness. The scenes in which Cera plays opposite himself are comedic gold, especially when attempting to go further with the girl of his dreams, a moment where Francois does all the talking for him as he adds various smaller phrases to attempt to soften the blow. The characterization work here is nothing short of brilliant.

The plot, on the other hand, is literally all over the place. Some of the tangents work really well, but some of them fail miserably. The laughs are also fairly sparse, though I feel that it has more to do with the audience trying to acclimate themselves to the world than the fact that the jokes don’t land on target. The film lives and breathes on its premise and on the absurdity of what happens next. If you’re willing to go there with the filmmakers, I’m sure you’ll enjoy the ride. If you find it hard to relate to the awkwardness of being a 16 year old, and the strangeness of how your first real relationship tripped from milestone to milestone, whether you’ve blocked it out or you’ve moved far beyond it in other ways such as maturity or age, then the film probably won’t work for you. I anticipate that the only way people can react to a film like this is love or hate, if only because it never attempts to appeal to the whole audience, and therefore often doesn’t. Even writing this review, I still don’t fully understand what I think of Youth and Revolt, so I apologize if my analysis proves unhelpful as a result.