Reality Bites (Ben Stiller, 1994)

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.

Captain Fantastic (Matt Ross, 2016)

Viggo Mortensen in Captain Fantastic

Ben: Viggo Mortensen
Bodevan: George MacKay
Kielyr: Samanta Isler
Vespyr: Annalise Basso
Rellian: Nicholas Hamilton
Zaja: Shree Crooks
Nai: Charlie Shotwell
Harper: Kathryn Hahn
Dave: Steve Zahn
Jack: Frank Langella
Abigail: Ann Dowd
Leslie: Trin Miller

Director: Matt Ross
Screenplay: Matt Ross
Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine
Production design: Russell Barnes
Film editing: Joseph Krings
Music: Alex Somers

From Woodstock to Mar-a-Lago, the terminus a quo and terminus ad quem of the Baby Boom generation. Or, as Matt Ross's Captain Fantastic would have it, from an off-the-grid cabin in the mountains to an opulent mansion beside a golf course. That, anyway, is how the film symbolizes the spiritual schism of the late 20th and early 21st century. It's a schism that manifests itself in the bipolar disorder of Leslie Cash, whom we see only in the visions of her husband, Ben, and in her casket. Anchored by yet another fine performance by Viggo Mortensen as Ben, the film risks becoming over-formulaic, especially in the big confrontation scene in which Ben pits his world view against that of Leslie's father at her funeral. The father is played by Frank Langella, who is an actor skilled at taking potentially one-note roles and adding the appoggiaturas they need to become interesting, so that even when world views collide in Captain Fantastic, we're not left to pick mere feel-good leftism out of the rubble. Ben and Leslie have tried to raise their six children uncontaminated by corporate capitalism, but the effort seems to have been too much for her -- after a breakdown, she is hospitalized and Ben carries on without her until her suicide forces him to take the precocious, home-schooled kids out into the world they never made. Ben can't resist showing them off, of course. At his sister's house he queries his teenage nephews about the Bill of Rights: The younger one thinks it has to do with what people are asked to pay for stuff, and the older knows vaguely that it has something to do with the government. So Ben marches out 8-year-old Zaja, who first starts by quoting it and is then prompted to articulate its significance, which she does superbly. But such encounters only emphasize how unprepared the kids are for anything but their own closed society. They may know the mechanics of sexuality, for example, but as the oldest son, Bodevan, discovers when he encounters a hot-to-trot teenage girl in a trailer park, they're unprepared for the real-world applications. There is, of course, no easy resolution for this culture clash, and Ross is forced into an ending that feels forced and compromised. Still, the performances of Mortensen, Langella, Kathryn Hahn, Steve Zahn, Ann Dowd, and especially the young actors playing the Cash family, make Captain Fantastic work as well as it could have.

Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998)

George Clooney, Ving Rhames, and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight

Jack Foley: George Clooney
Karen Sisco: Jennifer Lopez
Buddy Bragg: Ving Rhames
Maurice Miller: Don Cheadle
Adele: Catherine Keener
Marshal Sisco: Dennis Farina
Glenn Michaels: Steve Zahn
Richard Ripley: Albert Brooks
Chino: Luis Guzmán
Kenneth: Isaiah Washington
White Boy Bob: Keith Loneker
Moselle: Viola Davis
Midge: Nancy Allen
Hejira Henry: Samuel L. Jackson
Ray Nicolette: Michael Keaton

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Scott Frank
Based on a novel by Elmore Leonard
Cinematography: Elliot Davis
Film editing: Anne V. Coates

When George Clooney left ER in 1999, there were some who thought it was a case of David Caruso Syndrome: a TV star whose ego had led him to think he had outgrown the medium that made him famous and was ready for movie stardom. There was evidence to support this premise: Clooney had done a disastrous turn as Batman in Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin (1997), a film that Clooney himself has disowned, and his forgettable appearances as a leading man with Michelle Pfeiffer in the romantic comedy One Fine Day (Michael Hoffman, 1996) and with Nicole Kidman in the thriller The Peacemaker (Mimi Leder, 1997) had done little to establish his credibility as a film actor. The one exception was Out of Sight, and among other things it cemented a working relationship with the director who had brought out the best in Clooney, Steven Soderbergh. The two have since worked together numerous times, with Soderbergh serving as director and/or producer, as well as mentoring Clooney's own directing and producing career. What Soderbergh found in Clooney was a kind of puckishness and vulnerability that has been further developed into broad comedy by directors like Joel and Ethan Coen in such films as O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Hail, Caesar! (2016). But at the same time, Soderbergh helped Clooney figure out how to be a romantic leading man: His scenes with Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight have a kind of heat that Clooney never generated even with Pfeiffer or Kidman. That said, the romantic scenes in Out of Sight are probably the least entertaining part of the film. Much better are the scenes in which Clooney plays off against such wizardly character actors as Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Steve Zahn, and Albert Brooks. Out of Sight puts such superb actors as Catherine Keener and Viola Davis in tiny roles, and also supplies unbilled cameos for Michael Keaton -- as Ray Nicolette, the character he played in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997) -- and Samuel L. Jackson. It's wittily put together, with such teases as the opening sequence in which Clooney's Jack Foley angrily dashes his necktie to the ground before going across the street to rob a bank -- an action that isn't explained until halfway through the film, after numerous flashbacks and setting changes. It includes audacious surprises, such as the macabre-comic death of White Boy Bob, whose klutziness has been subtly hinted several times before he brains himself with a slip on the staircase. (Clooney's reaction to the death is priceless.)