Reality Bites (Ben Stiller, 1994)
Cast: Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Janeane Garofolo, Steve Zahn, Ben Stiller, Swoosie Kurtz, Joe Don Baker, John Mahoney, Harry O'Reilly, Susan Norfleet. Screenplay: Helen Childress. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Sharon Seymour. Film editing: Lisa Zeno Churgin, John Spence.
Every generation seems to have a film that speaks to its disaffection with the older generation, which is accused of incomprehension of the needs of the young for self-fulfillment and identity. For my own generation it was Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955). For the Baby Boomers it was The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967). In Reality Bites, Ben Stiller seems to have set out to make the definitive film for Generation X, who find themselves underemployed after having expected, as Winona Ryder's Lelaina Pierce puts it, "to be somebody by the time I was 23." Instead, they're bitten by reality: held back by people like Lelaina's boss, a Houston morning-show host played with the grin and dead eyes of a shark by John Mahoney, or with their real lives neatly packaged (in "reality bites") for the MTV generation, as her documentary footage is by the producers of the company for which Ben Stiller's Michael Grates works. Some give up and go along, as Vickie (Janeane Garofolo) does when she accepts a job as manager of an outlet of The Gap, attending jeans-folding seminars. Others, like Ethan Hawke's Troy Dyer, accept their slackerhood: "I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt." I think it's revealing that the meet-cute of Lelaina and Michael is brought about by a cigarette she throws into his convertible, causing their cars to collide. The amount of cigarette smoking in Reality Bites is an excessiveness we will probably not see again, but then this is a generation marked by AIDS and the threat of early death, so there's a kind of fatalism that pervades the lives of these characters. Reality Bites is not, I think, quite as distinguished a film as either Rebel Without a Cause or The Graduate. It spends too much time on the Troy-Lelaina-Michael triangle, with its predictable and rather sappy resolution, and not enough on Vickie and the closeted Sammy (Steve Zahn), whose stories -- her HIV test, his coming out -- are given perfunctory treatment. But there are enough bright lines and good performances to make it a movie worth revisiting.