Honolulu Weekly

High school movies–the successful ones, anyway–usually employ familiar archetypes. Fill the screen with characters like the beauty queen, the jock, the nerd and the social misfit, and the average viewer has somebody to relate to, as well as somebody to vilify.

Arguably, no film did this better than The Breakfast Club, with its broad base of characters. It’s from this model the documentary American Teen takes its cues. Following five students from Warsaw, Ind., a “mostly white” town with street signs reading simply “Church,” we watch the senior year of Megan, the Molly Ringwald-esque girl of privilege, Colin as Emilio Estevez’s jock (here substituting basketball for wrestling), and the hapless Jake, channeling Anthony Michael Hall-styled nerdiness. A new addition for the club is Mitch, as the heartthrob.

But of course, Judd Nelson owned the John Hughes film and his rebel front is manifested here in young Hannah, a musician and artist proud to be strange and confident enough to know that these years, while formative, can also be inconsequential. Out of all the youths, she’s the one who can see the forest for the trees, and is the most forthcoming on the absurdity of cliques, defying stereotypes by dating outside her station and trying to stake her own claim on her future.

Ironically, it’s the supposed “realness” of Hannah that makes the staged shots so jarring. (Are we really to believe she asked a full film crew to pull over and set up equipment because she felt like looking thoughtful and pensive in what just happens to be an incredibly picturesque scene?) There are several such moments, and American Teen rings false in all of them. Why would kids–hooked up with microphones and followed around by cameras–try to conceal illegal or risque behavior when it’s all been documented? But with a generation used to documenting their lives via blogs, Facebook and YouTube, perhaps they really are oblivious to the camera.

Colin and Mitch both get a fair amount of screen time, but it’s Hannah who commands our attention, leaving Jake as comic relief, whose every utterance is a painful self-effacing acknowledgement of his own awkwardness. After pushing forward in his ultimate quest to get a girlfriend, like he’s accomplished hundred of times in the video games he takes solace in, he finds a chance with a freshman new to the area. “Since she doesn’t know anything about me,” he says. “I might have a chance.” When she dumps him on camera, he rests his head on he table, only to comment that the table is greasy–from his face.

Every film needs a villain, and rich girl Megan, called a drama queen by some and more pointed pejoratives by most, provides one in spades. Callously and arbitrarily attacking friends and enemies alike, she’s more Heathers than Breakfast Club, only without the CornNuts-fueled comeuppance. Her antics range from forwarding a classmate’s embarrassing photo to everybody, to spray-painting a homophobic slur on her political rival’s window. While Hannah is the one to love and Jake is the one to pity, Megan is the one to hate and, you can feel the audience seethe whenever she’s on screen. Of course, we’re not surprised when she gets away with her antics with no more than a slap on the wrist.

Perhaps as interesting as the kids themselves are the parents, most of whom show an unbelievable lack of skill. Colin’s father’s efforts to push him into a basketball scholarship border on obsessive, with constant reminders that he either gets a scholarship or joins the military. Megan’s father’s Notre Dame alliance overrides all her bad behavior. (Curiously absent are Mitch and Jake’s parents, presumably too down-to-earth to be cinematically interesting.) Most unbelievable is when Hannah’s mother, in an attempt to dissuade her from applying to colleges in California, glibly states, “You’re not special.”

American Teen isn’t perfect, but it strikes a nerve and if anything, it may make younger viewers reassess their own cliques. If kids weren’t so painfully embarrassed about being seen by their parents, this would be a perfect family film. Both generations have a lot to learn.

Why are all the little shorties humping Ben Kingsley this year? In The Wackness, Mary-Kate Olsen got busy with him in a phone booth and now, in Elegy, Penelope Cruz bumps uglies with the Oscar winner who, as time goes by, is beginning to look more and more like Golem.

Regardless of the reasoning behind his sudden wealth of sumthin’ sumthin’, Kingsley stars as David Kepesh, a professor of practical criticism in New York City and supporter of the concept of debauched Bacchanalia, rebelling against our country of straight-laced Puritanism. What else would you expect from an academic who wrote a book entitled The Origins of American Hedonism?

Cruz plays Consuela Castillo, a much-younger student who becomes his lover. The professor becomes instantly obsessed with losing his new object of desire, constantly fretting with “his terrible jealousy,” even as he continues sleeping with another former student, a much older one played by a blunt, yet wearily knowing Patricia Clarkson. Dennis Hopper plays his lecherous best friend, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who urges the falling David to keep things on a FTF level.

As the title would suggest, the proceedings are mournful, but there is no real sense of passion or even chemistry between Kingsley and Cruz. Not once do we believe we are watching real people engage in a subtle, bedroom game of sexual and mental domination. At 34 years old, Cruz tries to make herself look younger by combing her bangs down to her eyebrows, and while she spends much of the film topless, thus qualifying it as a naked performance, it’s not a convincingly vulnerable one. Kingsley spends the entire film in what seems a wide-eyed daze. He may be trying to tune in to the somber voice-over narration his character gives the proceedings, but it just looks like he’s thinking to himself, “At this point in my career, how is it that I am getting so much ass?”

Based on the Philip Roth novella The Dying Animal, the film even lacks the source material’s cacophonic sense of analytical neurosis; Elegy wants romance to triumph over its inherent sense of subversiveness. Besides the dependable Clarkson, the actors that make the most impact have the smallest roles. Shattered Glass’s Peter Sarsgaard, looking like a doughy Kiefer Sutherland, plays David’s son with a tired, helpless sense of resentment at his morally objectionable father. Ex-Blondie singer Deborah Harry has a cameo as Dennis Hopper’s wife; her weary eyes show the costs of supporting a husband she knows is cheating on her.

Unlike those two performances, the flawed Elegy isn’t thoughtful, passionate, or, ultimately, truthful in its tragedy of old age and its accompanying desires. It’s a film about selfish people pushed to their sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological extremities that just isn’t funereal enough.