Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  We’ve already seen cheerleaders by this time; Lucas is not trying to ignore high school movie convention. It simply contrasts the familiar with the quiet strangeness of its central character, a boy who stalks bugs and feels that leading your dream girl through sewer tunnels in order to hear a classical music recital for free is perfectly good date material.

  Lucas may be an unlikely Casanova, but he’s persistent. He walks Maggie to her car – yep, this is one of those perennially sunny, white and wealthy neighbourhoods where even the toddlers drive convertibles – and boasts about how many friends he has at Park High in Illinois, the school she’s just about to start attending. When he calls over to the footballers and cheerleaders and gets no response, we think he’s a fantasist. And he is . . . but not in that petty kind of way. Lucas does have cool friends. He’s hiding something far more important.

  This is where Seltzer’s narrative scores high. You keep thinking you know exactly where this is all heading . . . and the film confounds you at every turn. Admittedly, you do work out Lucas’s guilty secret long before the ‘twist’, but, apart from that, this is a tale that keeps you guessing. Lucas really does make good his seduction boast and introduce Maggie to the cool kids. Unfortunately, that’s where his heartbreak begins.

  Seltzer’s character study revolves around a couple of key elements. First, Lucas has been ‘accelerated’ into high school by virtue of his academic prowess. He is therefore physically and emotionally younger than his immediate peers, even though he’s far smarter. Second, he’s a tough little bastard, and nobody’s victim, even when someone sets out to make him one. Third, he’s a real 14-year-old boy; that is, an utter wanker from time to time. And finally, he is having to deal with a variety of attitudes towards him, because the cool kids at Park High don’t act like a mindless mob. Some want to bully him, while others see him as a kind of plucky school mascot. Lucas meets all of these responses with the same mixture of inner strength and utter bemusement.

  Of course, Seltzer had no way of knowing, when he cast Haim along with Charlie Sheen as college football star Cappie, what kind of car-crash resonance these two would lend his teen classic in 2011. Haim is a revelation, but watching Sheen be the kind of stand-up guy who risks exclusion from the cool group in order to hang out with and protect Lucas and fall in love with Maggie, just at the very moment in early 2011 when the square-jawed nutter became the planet’s byword for sociopathic hedonism, is very weird indeed. He just seems so sweet here. Even if, looks-wise, he isn’t your particular pipe-full of crack, you’ll entirely understand why Maggie swoons in the face of his jock-with-a-human-face schtick. It’s also just about the only role I’ve seen him in where he isn’t some kind of distressing parody of his father Martin’s talent, as if Seltzer caught him before cynicism and drugs forced him to play shallow bad boy so regularly that fact and fiction inevitably fused. Charlie Sheen is actually good in this movie, which makes it a unique experience in itself. You can’t help wondering what he and Haim got up to on set, though.

  But Seltzer’s winningest ticket is his dialogue. Astonishingly, these teen characters don’t talk like ciphers, plot devices or self-conscious postmodern parodies of stereotypes. They talk like real kids, veering off the subject, expressing vulnerabilities in self-protective ways, pretending to be wiser than their years. This allows scenes between key characters to go beyond the usual wham-bam of comedy, tragedy and exposition, and develop into the slow and subtle dance we do when trying to find out just how far we can go with each other.

  Take the scene where Maggie and Cappie find themselves alone in a laundry room, with its undertones of adult domesticity. Rather than the standard lunge ’n’ snog, the pair circle each other warmly and warily, gently moving closer through humour, winsome stares, loaded questions and shared chewing gum, using their feelings about Lucas and Cappie’s girlfriend Alise as a coded way of discussing their feelings for each other, getting their attack of conscience, gently moving apart in a way that lets us and each other know that their coming together is inevitable. It’s charming and sexy and genuinely romantic, and, although the scene only lasts seven minutes, seven minutes is, in low-attention-span teen movie terms, the equivalent of an epic staring match between Eric Rohmer and John Cassevetes.

  The one credulity-straining element surrounds Rina, played by Winona Ryder in her film debut. Rina has a big old crush on Lucas, and the obvious observation is that Ryder’s far too beautiful to be the rejected girl-geek. I mean, that girl saunters onscreen and you forget where you live, never mind what Kerri Green looks like. But then again, you also remember what strange ideas teens have about what’s cool or sexy or good-looking, and, in my case, how many great girls I blew off in favour of some whey-faced thing who denoted status and acceptance at school; the girl who would make me cool if I could pull her . . . which I never did. So Seltzer’s probably got that about right, too. There are few things stupider in this world than an adolescent boy.

  So the lovely Winona is just part of the pleasure and intrigue within Lucas’s pre-Juno (see here) world. There are groovy details like Lucas’s obsessive bitching about the ‘superficial’, which is his desperate attempt to degrade everything he can’t have and everyone attractive or rich enough to have it. The strange sub-plots about locusts and a dead music teacher. A scene where Lucas is humiliated at a school assembly, yet somehow turns the moment on its head. More insect symbolism – ’cos the superficial world doesn’t appreciate the beauty and intelligence of insects, right? – as the whole school hang out at a creature-feature cinema night featuring the original and brilliant version of The Fly with Vincent Price. Jeremy Pivens as a muscle-bound jock looking exactly the same as she does as Ari in the Entourage TV show. Plus the film also answers the question of why American kids are so obsessed with gridiron and cheerleading. Buses to away games. Driver too busy to worry about what’s going on behind him. Parent-free canoodling and boozing opportunities legitimised by school and society in general! And finally, I get it.

  Lucas also boasts one of the cleverest endings of any movie in the 1980s. Basically, poor Lucas suffers that universal rite of passage . . . the moment when one first hears, from the eternal object of desire, that they only see you as a friend. His response is a futile and heroic gesture that gains him the respect and admiration of the entire school. If I say that it involves The Big Football Game and remind you that this film was made in the air-punching, ‘YEAH!!!’-hollering Reagan ’80s, then you can fill in the dots. Except . . . you’d be wrong. Seltzer puts his hero in genuine peril, and takes the viewer’s assumption that Hollywood can somehow make this tiny boy into the school sports hero right to hospital.

  Lucas Blye’s triumph is not about becoming an all-American winner. It’s actually about the extraordinary kindness children are capable of when they realise that they were wrong. Seltzer manages to give his producers the inspirational ending all ’80s youth movies required while keeping the movie’s integrity intact and subverting American notions of what winning actually means. It’s the icing on the cake of one of the great neglected films of its era.

  RIVER’S EDGE

  1986

  Starring: Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye, Daniel Roebuck, Joshua Miller, Dennis Hopper

  Dir.: Tim Hunter

  Plot: The first true ‘indie’ teen movie.

  Key line: ‘I hear you’re all gonna go see a dead girl.’

  River’s Edge is one of those movies where the central protagonist is already dead. We learn nothing about her except that her name was Jamie, she was skinny and blonde, that she might have talked shit about somebody’s dead mother, and that this testimony is somewhat unreliable because it comes from the boy who murdered her. But, without Jamie, and the haunting shots of her pale naked body and dead blue eyes, there wouldn’t be a movie. Her death gives the teens of this godforsaken part of Sacramento, California a life, for a few short days.

  This ahead-of-its-time masterpiece was, like Badlands (see here) and
Heavenly Creatures (see here), inspired by a real-life murder. In 1981, a hulking 16-year-old called Anthony Jacques Broussard raped and strangled 14-year-old Marcy Renee Conrad to death in Miliptas, California. It was reported that the boy had been mentally disturbed since discovering his dead mother in the shower at age 7, and, crucially, that the murder of Marcy had been unreported for two days despite the fact that he had shown several friends the body. Broussard is still serving time in Folsom Prison, of all places.

  English student Neal Jimenez read the press story and was inspired to write a screenplay. But, unlike the writers of Badlands and Heavenly Creatures, Jimenez didn’t attempt to reconstruct or fictionalise the real story. He simply used the bare facts as foundation for a tale about his generation: an aimless group of American teens that would come to be media-defined as ‘Generation X’ or ‘Slackers’, who had zoned out completely from their elders’ debates about ’60s liberalism versus ’80s conservatism, had no moral or ethical viewpoints, and who saw the world through the fantasies of television and film. The result was a movie that came on like trailer-trash Brett Easton Ellis, was directed by Tim Hunter with a pungent, grungy elegance that stood in direct opposition to the plasticising of rival American teen movies, and invented the ‘indie’ style that defined the best American teen movies of the post-Richard Linklater (see Dazed And Confused, here) ’90s and beyond.

  The plot is simple, self-contained, pulpy and full of tragic inevitability. By the banks of the river, 12-year-old Tim (Miller) discovers the monstrous John ‘Samson’ Tollet (Roebuck) sitting next to the frozen corpse of his girlfriend. Rather than attempting to hide the crime, Samson spills all to his school friends and brings them down to the river to show them the evidence. The group’s delusional, loud-mouthed leader Layne (Glover) not only wants to cover up the crime, but sees himself as the star of his own noir drama, while Tim’s big brother Matt (Reeves) wants to turn Samson in. Layne eventually persuades Samson to hide out at the home of Feck (Hopper), a middle-aged, one-legged dope dealer who may or may not have murdered his own girlfriend many years before. While Matt goes to the police and sets off a manhunt and a media scandal, Feck finds his own solution to the problem of a boy whose madness outstrips his own.

  The weird thing about all this? It’s actually a comedy.

  Aesthetically, much of the movie’s power comes from Tim Hunter’s ability to find a sinister beauty in an ugly, poverty-stricken part of California Hollywood doesn’t think we want to look at, and Jurgen Knieper’s score, which dumps ’80s synth new wave in favour of Bernard Herrmann-esque orchestral motifs, which juxtapose cinematic melodrama with the movie’s ugly wasteland of rough scrub, dilapidated housing, battered cars and hardcore punk from the likes of Slayer and Wipers.

  But the movie’s greatest coups are the cast and the lead characters. River’s Edge pulls off something that its bleak offspring largely don’t. It’s one thing to put blank, emotionless, amoral teens on celluloid and set out to shock. It’s another to make them fun to hang out with. Crispin Glover’s performance is a comic gem, allowing a potentially grim and disturbing tale to be fun. The bulky Roebuck is as believably threatening as any teen killer on celluloid. And even though Miller’s tiny, androgynous Tim is every parent’s pet-killing gun-stealing nightmare, you can’t help but grin along with his sardonic precociousness.

  And Keanu? This is the film that explains why the man became a megastar. Reeves has the thankless role: the solid nice guy amidst four male characters who get to say and do thrilling outlandish things every time they’re onscreen. But he is beautiful, admirable and utterly compelling . . . the perfect audience representative amongst the crazies. It’s Reeves who makes the unlikely bromance between decent Matt and deluded Layne feel entirely natural.

  And then there’s the late Dennis Hopper. In exactly the same year that he reinvented himself as Blue Velvet’s Frank, the old wife-beater – Oh yeah . . . he’s dead and we’re supposed to skip all that and be all sentimental and call him a lovable reprobate. I forgot, sorry – plays exactly the same guy here, except that the prop has changed from oxygen mask to inflatable doll. And . . . he’s brilliant. The old reprobate.

  He gets one fuck of an entrance. Feck announces himself by playing one rude note on a saxophone while the inflatable doll looks on, open-mouthed with admiration. He hops to the front door on his one leg with a gun, opens the door, points the gun at Crispin Glover’s head and growls, ‘The cheque’s in the mail.’ Hopper and Glover mug the rest of the scene so furiously that they both burst into laughter. It could have been scripted. I prefer to think not.

  Just in case you’re missing the esteem in which Hopper is held around here, the dialogue references Easy Rider around three minutes later. How many iconic, over-the-top character actors can give a teen movie a direct link to Rebel Without A Cause (see here)?

  There are scenes that are pure black comedy genius. Samson is holed up with Feck, ragging the ruggedly handsome but confused drug casualty about his inflatable girlfriend. ‘Hey Feck,’ Samson asks, aggressively. ‘Are you a psycho or something?’ Hopper sits up straight and answers, deadpan: ‘No. I’m normal. She’s a doll. I know that . . . right, Ellie?’ A few minutes later he reminisces, ‘I ate so much pussy in those days my beard looked like a glazed doughnut.’ I hope I’m doing this stuff justice. Dennis Hopper’s a great Dennis Hopper in a fair few things. But this, pound-for-pound, for me, is his best performance.

  But even Hopper is outgunned by Crispin Glover. This is one of those rare and beautiful performances: a full-on scenery-chewing method camp-fest, in the tradition of Al Pacino in Scarface and Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, locating manic slapstick comedy in villainy yet somehow convincing you of some inner truth, and being so obviously enjoyed by the actor that you can almost see the peals of on-set laughter as soon as Hunter yells, ‘Cut.’ His Layne is a fabulous creation, somehow combining the macho, the gay, the feminine, the Valley Dude, the flamboyant glam-punk and the teen psycho in one compelling package of twitching, writhing, pop-eyed perpetual motion.

  But River’s Edge is also packed with plenty of understated and quietly moving moments. At one point, Ione Skye’s Clarissa and Reeves’s Matt are walking home, and the gallant Matt offers her his jacket to keep off the cold. She dismisses the need and carries on talking. The film jumps forward to them reaching their destination, and you notice that she’s now wearing the jacket. In a movie where the shallow and self-absorbed reactions to a murder have subverted all the connections between people, Clarissa’s acceptance of Matt’s gallantry is an oasis of simple humanity, and a sure, subtle sign that these two are made of different and redeemable stuff from Layne, Samson and Tim.

  River’s Edge might be the ultimate generation-gap movie. The adults here, whether weak, childish mother, bullying stepdad and cops, sanctimonious ex-hippie teacher Mr Burkewaite or his ’60s casualty mirror image Feck, do not share a language with these children. They don’t understand them and the kids do not want to be understood. When Clarissa confesses that she admires Mr Burkewaite, an amused Matt replies, ‘You respect an adult? I really do need to get stoned.’

  And although he’s joking, he’s not joking. River’s Edge mocks not just adult America and its misty-eyed view of itself, but everything that previous generations of writers and film-makers have said about teenagers. These kids are as alien to the grown-up inhabitants of their town as The Blob (see here).

  In the context of this movie, every reference to a ‘better’, more innocent American past feels like nihilistic satire. Take the scene in the tacky ’50s-themed fast-food diner. As Layne and his waiter friend talk, a great Hank Ballard rhythm ’n’ blues ballad is playing over the sound system, and you cannot stop yourself thinking about American Graffiti (see here) and how romantic and innocent the scenes played out to this kind of soundtrack were. The tune keeps playing as a now ever-increasing gang of bored teens go to look at a corpse, and you’re not sure if the American Graffiti reference is deliberate, but it s
ure as hell feels like it is, and that River’s Edge is, in a dark way, agreeing with George Lucas that kids were just nicer before ’60s liberals insisted that they were old enough to know and see and experience everything – through television, through being left to their own devices by useless parents – before the girls needed sanitary towels and the boys needed razors. ‘I’m here to turn back time,’ dead-eyed killer Samson announces, holding a gun to a shopkeeper’s head.

  But conversely, River’s Edge is so ahead of its time in look, feel and attitude that it feels like a post-internet movie; you keep expecting one of these aimless nihilists to whip out a mobile, take a snap of their decomposing friend and post it on www.cadaverblog.com.

  The movie connects the ’50s movie youth with their post-punk counterparts by reviving the juvenile delinquent habit of mocking media clichés about troubled teens. At one point a kid even critiques the movie itself. ‘This entire episode is in bad taste. You young people are a disgrace to the human race . . . to all living things . . . to plants even.’ But, while girlie-boy Layne comparing himself to Chuck Norris is a cultural reference made to make us guffaw, there is a serious point. When Samson explains his feelings about killing to Feck, he chooses his words carefully. ‘She couldn’t move, she couldn’t scream. I had total control of her. Total control of her. It felt so real. It felt so . . . real!’ Which leaves you with the disturbing thought that, for the modern teen, the only action that doesn’t feel like Chuck Norris or reality TV, that doesn’t feel like one is hovering above oneself, watching a drama called your life unfold, unwilling to direct the action, is having the power to end life. That something this haunting can emerge from a film that’s so entertaining and funny – that’s why I said masterpiece earlier, and that’s why I meant it.