REVIEW: American Teen (A)

Background: Although I first heard about American Teen after it premiered at Sundance in January, it wasn't until Craig Kennedy blurbed about it later in the spring that it landed on my radar for good. When I noticed it was on the schedule for a director-present screening at the MSPIFF, it was a must-see (you can read more about Nanette Burnstein's experience making the film in my preview). Going into it I expected little more than a prolonged episode of some trashy MTV show. Now? Let's just say my negative opinion of those shows is even more pronounced after seeing that teens can actually be documented in a thoughtful way.

Synopsis : Burnstein covers a year in the life of four high school seniors in Warsaw, IN. Hannah is the dropout risk who considers her last year a prison sentence; she wants to leave Warsaw immediately. Colin is under pressure to earn a basketball scholarship. His dad is an Elvis impersonator who tells Colin that it's either college or the Army. Megan is a spoiled princess, the popular girl, who terrorizes classmates and plans her future at Notre Dame. Jake is the stereotypical lovelorn geek, obsessed with video games but awkward in social situations. Mitch, a fifth subject that is mostly thrown in as a love interest for Hannah (and to round out the Breakfast Club poster rip-off), is the cool jock that can't quite be trusted. Where will they all end up by graduation?

I Loved:
+ The animated Notre Dame-as-utopia sequence. No offense to the many Notre Dame alumni that I consider friends, but you all deserve that!
+ The genuinely emotional moments, such as Hannah's conversations with her parents.
+ The really hilarious moments of social awkwardness. Poor Jake.

I Liked:
+ The epilogues, which added one more layer to our relationship with the film's subjects.
+ That teachers and school administrators weren't included as supporting players. The focus was on the right place: the teens.
+ The comforting realization that the American high school experience is so similar from place to place.

I Disliked:
- The horrifying realization that the American high school experience is so similar from place to place.
- When the use of animated sequences distracted from or trivialized the real world situations.

I Hated:
- The maliciousness celebrated by Megan and her gang, reminiscent of a documentary adaptation of Mean Girls.

Grade:
Writing - N/A
Acting - N/A
Production - 9
Emotional Impact - 10
Music - 5
Significance - 5

Total: 29/30= 97% = A

Last Word: American Teen is a very easy film to criticize. It doesn't tell a new story, it furthers all the typical stereotypes of American high school students, it smacks of reality TV and it doesn't wrap everything up in a nice, neat message-laden ending. So what? It's hilarious, moving, relevant, and honest, despite the accusations that it may not be. In fact, at the screening I attended Nanette Burnstein said the students actually dialed down their behavior when the cameras weren't rolling, and that the only scene recreated was when Hannah received the text message from Mitch.

In any case, part of me wants to argue that this debate is actually meaningless. American Teen is not an investigation on the war in Iraq or a historical record of a controversial incident. It's simply a contemporary glimpse (and it's only a glimpse) at the challenges facing most teens in America today: developing romances, college choices, "fitting in", family relationships, independence, etc. Nothing new, of course, but maybe that's the point: these issues are just as important to teens in 2008 as they were in 1958. Isn't that fact something to reflect on in and of itself?

I enjoy documentaries like American Teen because they have the potential to unite people. In the case of this film, we come together to look back and collectively laugh at the trivial nature of high school, at the naive sense of urgency that made us think those four years were so important, and at the countless ways in which we tried to make ourselves "different" while somehow still fitting in to the right social groups.

It turns out that, as American Teen amusingly demonstrates, we have a lot more in common with each other - both now and then - than we would like to admit. The American public high school experience is one of the great equalizers in life. Most of us went through the wringer and made it out alive on the other side, and whatever we ended up doing in the years since then, that little bubble of time remains a shared pot from which we can still draw some common insights and perspectives.

Spoken like a näive high school student, right? Forgive me - American Teen successfully reawakened that idealistic spirit in me.