Four stars. Rating: R, and rather harshly, for occasional profanity and teen drinking
By Derrick Bang
This is why I love my job.
The Kings of Summer marks an impressive feature
debut for director Joran Vogt-Roberts and writer Chris Galletta, the latter
with nothing more to his credit than a brief 2005 stint as a production staff
member for The Late Show with David
Letterman. Vogt-Roberts’ résumé includes several shorts and a lot of TV
series work, the latter suggesting the hilariously snarky mind set on ample
display in this film.
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| Having more or less completed their new home away from home, our three young renegades — from left, Joe (Nick Robinson), Patrick (Gabriel Basso) and Biaggio (Moises Arias) — contemplate the next challenge: putting food on the table. That'll prove far more difficult than anticipated, since they've no experience with traps, lures, bare-handed fishing or any other woodsian skills. |
Actually, calling this picture “impressive”
isn’t nearly strong enough. It’s a sure-fire audience pleaser: one of those
so-called “little films” — like Little
Miss Sunshine or Juno —
guaranteed to take off like a rocket, once word gets out. This year’s enthusiastic
Sundance Festival audience certainly thought so, granting a nomination for the
Grand Jury Prize (not won, alas).
As a collaborative team,
Vogt-Roberts and Galletta demonstrate a striking degree of creative synch; the
latter’s dialogue sounds just right
coming from the naturalistic ensemble cast, granting a level of verisimilitude
that makes these characters feel like the folks next door.
Allowing, that is, for a
left-of-center gaggle of eccentrics commonly found in films by Wes Anderson or
the Coen Brothers. But I mean that in the gentlest way: However funny the
lines, however warped some of the emotional behavior by sidebar adults, this is
— first and foremost — an intimate coming-of-age saga.
In the truest sense of the old
cliché, we laugh with our young
protagonists, not at them.
The contemporary setting is a
smallish town in Northeast Ohio, the sort of all-American community that
typifies such narratives. Best friends Joe (Nick Robinson) and Patrick (Gabriel
Basso) are strongly bonded, in part, by their inability to cope with utterly
impossible parents.
Joe’s father, Frank (Nick
Offerman), hasn’t yet recovered from his wife’s untimely death, years earlier.
He has become bitter, condescending and imperious: a combination that doesn’t
blend well with a teenage son’s instinctive rebelliousness. Joe’s favorite
method of revenge, when sufficiently annoyed, is to summon the local law —
personified by the competent Capt. Davis (Mary Lynn Rajskub) and her absolutely
useless rookie companion (Thomas Middleditch) — on some trumped-up accusation.
Frank responds to such hijinks
the way he deals with everybody: angry sarcasm delivered by Offerman with a
relentlessly straight face ... which, of course, makes every bile-fueled line
that much funnier. (And they’re pretty funny to begin with.)
Joe’s older sister, Heather
(Alison Brie), fled the tension-laced home awhile back, although she still
visits. That speaks well of the young woman; her choice of male companions,
however, does not. Colin (Eugene Cordero) is a misfit who’s as oblivious to
social cues, as he is to the fact that Frank constantly winds him up.
In this case, we can hardly blame
Frank; Colin’s much too easy a
target. Which Heather is aware of, and Brie’s face is an amusing study in
conflict: clearly annoyed by her loutish father, but equally embarrassed by her
clueless boyfriend.
Elsewhere, Patrick spends each
waking moment smothered by nerdy, overprotective parents — Megan Mullally and
Marc Evan Jackson — whose every word and action induces cringes ... both from
their son, and from us. Their behavior is beyond ghastly; it’s awkwardly
inappropriate to a degree that defies description.
No surprise, then, that Patrick
sports an remarkable case of hives; Basso skulks from one room to the next, his
body laced with tension, his face eternally set in an anticipatory wince,
knowing that he’ll momentarily flinch from some new parental transgression.
The true magnitude of Joe and
Patrick’s suffering can be measured by the degree to which they regard high
school as a comfort zone ... because we all know how horrible that environment can be.
School has an additional benefit
for Joe: closer proximity to Kelly (Erin Moriarty, in a thoughtful, amiable
performance), a lively, free-spirited girl he has tracked for awhile. Better
yet, it appears that her current relationship might be heading south, leaving
her available. Best of all, she seems to enjoy Joe’s company.
But he’s not allowed the
opportunity to contemplate this situation. Stung by one too many dismissive
acts by his father, Joe decides to run away from home ... albeit not in the
usual way. Joe has a plan, and he wants Patrick on board; the latter resists
only until his next parental
humiliation, at which point he’s all in.
Joe’s grand scheme: to build a
home — not a fort, not a tree-house, but an entire multi-room dwelling — in the
middle of the dense, nearby woods. A place they can call their own, and where
they can call their own shots, unencumbered by parental baggage. Set their own
schedule. Hunt and cook their own food.
The very notion is ironic,
because — as we’ve already seen, in the film’s opening moments — Joe can’t even
construct a bird house.
But that’s a minor detail;
enthusiasm and hard work should be sufficient compensation. (In theory.) As the
actual “house” rises, it’s a mirthful blend of found materials, stolen
bric-a-brac and a couple hundred bucks’ worth of stuff from Home Depot.
Production designer Tyler B. Robinson obviously had a great time sorting it all
out, and the result looks precisely what unskilled teens might erect.
Patrick is mildly surprised, as
this ambitious project begins, to discover that they’ve been joined by a mascot
of sorts: Biaggio (Moises Arias), their high school’s token “weird kid.”
“I’m afraid to tell him to
leave,” Joe confesses, responding to Patrick’s quite reasonable question. “I
don’t know what he’s capable of.”
Arias isn’t merely funny; he’s a
revelation. The younger actor has taken everything he learned during five years
on television’s Hannah Montana, and
channeled it into the sort of career-making performance from which fat
contracts are spawned. His line deliveries are impeccably timed, and — like
Offerman’s Frank — Arias’ expression always is dead serious. But there’s a
difference: Frank is impassively patronizing, whereas Biaggio is simply sincere.
He’s like a lost puppy,
desperately wanting to belong; neither Patrick nor Joe could be cruel enough to
cast him out. And, so, they become a trio.
Although the subsequent bonding
has a euphoric, “boys of summer” spirit that can’t help making all of us feel
wistful about our own teenhoods, Vogt-Roberts and Galletta have more serious
issues in mind. All three teens have been emotionally stunted by their home
environments; however droll and never-entirely-successful this attempt at
independence, they’re now in a position to help each other achieve adulthood.
Of a sort.
And while Biaggio’s unexpected
arrival proves cathartic in a beneficial way — his crazed and increasingly wild
antics notwithstanding — the same can’t be said of Joe’s eventual decision to
let Kelly in on the secret. Because everybody knows that an all-guy dynamic,
particularly one this precarious, can be destroyed by the presence of a woman.
Robinson — a veteran of another
tween TV series, Melissa & Joey —
is spot-on as our lead protagonist: the guy who drives the action and makes his
two companions believe in unspecified possibilities. Joe has no end-game in
mind; a moment’s rational thought would reveal that this situation can’t
possibly endure. But Robinson grants his performance a deft blend of
earnestness and fatalism, and his persuasiveness leaps off the screen; we want
to be there, right at his side.
Basso, with a string of credits
going back six years, is equally persuasive as the best-friend follower. As a
telling scene between the two fathers eventually reveals, Joe has been the
instigator of numerous previous, ah, “escapades” involving both boys. This
best-bud dynamic is intriguing because it’s counter-intuitive: Basso is the
more imposing of the two actors, with the height and weight that ordinarily
would make him a leader. But Patrick
is a psychiatrist’s manual of insecurities — all persuasively displayed on
Basso’s expressive face — and thus looks to Joe for guidance.
Until and unless he can find it
elsewhere.
Although the core scenario and
various character dynamics are engaging enough on their own, Galletta’s killer
dialogue sweetens the pot even further. His lines are to die for, and
Vogt-Roberts ensures that each is delivered to maximum potential. Your natural
desire to watch this film again will help reveal some choice exchanges that’ll
probably get buried the first time, because people will be laughing so hard at
the previous lines.
Ryan Miller’s underscore adds a
note of poignance at key moments, but I’m less enthralled by the hard rock
tunes inserted by the likes of Youth Lagoon, Thin Lizzy and MGMT ... not
because they’re inappropriate, but because they’re much too loud, and overwhelm
the film’s mostly gentle tone. Sound mixers Ryan Putz and Marlowe Taylor could
have done better.
But that’s small stuff. The Kings of Summer is a revelation:
equal parts shrewdly perceptive, unexpectedly poignant and continuously
uproarious. That’s not easy to sustain for 93 minutes, but Vogt-Roberts and
Galletta pull it off: right up to the absolutely perfect final scene.
I can’t wait to see what these
guys do next.
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