Kicking & Screaming (1995)

KICKING & SCREAMING (1995)

Dir: Noah Baumbach

“You guys all talk alike”

The son of two film critics who studies at Vassar College, takes his experiences and threads a narrative around that problematic year that occurs post-college. Noah Baumbach was 26 when he created his feature debut Kicking and Screaming. Baumbach has described his films as movies about people who have an image of themselves they can't live up to. We see this again and again in his work. Whether it’s Grover as a prolific novelist in Kicking or Charlie Barber as a perfectionist playwright and father in Marriage Story (2019), this theme runs throughout his filmography. As each film is deeply personal, we can only wonder if Baumbach suffers from these same feelings. This is what makes his films feel raw. He connects with the emotions associated with inadequacy and therein lies something we’ve all experienced.

For Baumbach’s first film, to garner funding, the distributor demanded a star in the film. Baumbach contacted his friend Eric Stolz who agreed. Stolz’s character Chet was not in the script. He became an improvised character and to this day, the most memorable character of the film. I originally saw this film in high school and have found myself all these years later still saying, “I’m paraphrasing myself here…” and getting a good chuckle. Chet as a 10th year college senior seems so alien, yet so perfect in this film about post-graduation anxiety. Trying to imagine this film without Chet is impossible.

Kicking and Screaming exists in a Seinfeld world. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld’s show had been on the air since 1989. We’re six years into the show’s run when Baumbach’s film is released. Society is fully conditioned to watch a story about nothing. Prior to the popularity of Seinfeld, were the early works of Hal Hartley such as The Unbelievable Truth (1989) and Trust (1990). Because society had not been primed for films about nothing but heady ideas and wit, Hartley is still an underdog filmmaker. But in a conditioned world, wordy films like Clerks (1994), Reservoir Dogs (1992), and Swingers (1998) would catapult their directors into stardom. Though Kicking and Screaming didn’t rocket it’s director into instant fame, the film was well received. The case can be made that Baumbach eventually tied raw emotion to his characters and that is what allowed his films about nothing to become a success. Whether that’s true or not is besides the point. All these years later, one can view Baumbach’s debut and still pull lines of dialogue that are written with absolute precision and wit. It remains a quintessential piece of post collegiate angst.

“I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I'm reminiscing this right now. I can't go to the bar because I've already looked back on it in my memory... and I didn't have a good time.” Priceless.