Reality Bites ***
(1994)
Starring: Winona Ryder, Ben Stiller, Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, Janeane Garofalo
Directed by: Ben Stiller
Screenplay: Helen Childress

[Ed. note: I wrote this review, of course, speaking as an uninvolved, neutral third party with no axe to grind. I think you'll agree that it shows.]

This is one of those movies that serves as a cautionary tale: Doing a great job with the first hour and fifteen minutes doesn't mean you're home free. Having said that, I will say that this review gives away the plot in a way I usually don't. The reason for that is that the movie's major flaw -- its huge, unfixable flaw -- is how terribly wrong its plot goes in the last ten minutes or so. It's so bad that it throws off the whole film. So if you're waiting to see it, skip this till later. I'll still be here.

Yes, and he's crying on the inside, etc. etc. etc.

Lelaina Pierce (Winona Ryder) is a recent college graduate who has a relatively promising future, including an apartment she shares with her friend Vicki (Janeane Garofalo, in the first part that made her really famous) and an internship at a local morning TV show hosted by an unctuous creep (John Mahoney, Frasier). She fills her time hanging out with Vicki, as well as with her friends Sammy (Steve Zahn) and Troy (Ethan Hawke). Sammy is gay (everybody in a chat flick has to have a gay friend), and he's in the process of trying to figure out how to come out to his mother. Troy is a bit more complicated. Intelligent and possessing a brutally sharp wit, he is nonetheless content to drift from one meaningless job to another, apparently gaining most of his pleasure in life from burying barbs under the skin of others -- especially Lelaina. Sure, sure, he does it because he likes her, but as the film progresses, it's bothering her more and more.

When things begin to go bad for Lelaina, they go really bad. First, she gets into a fender-bender with a friendly MTV executive named Michael Grates (Ben Stiller) (oh, it's not officially MTV, but it is), and then she loses her job. She manages to get into fights with her friends regularly, particularly Troy, who she is always needling to get his act together and get a real job and stop living a life where all he does is "eat and couch and fondle the remote control." He hates the needling, but he likes that she's paying attention. (This where anyone who has ever been in one of these relationships says, "Ahhhh, I sense a vicious cycle here.") Clearly, it makes him feel safe and snuggly to know he's causing her so much anxiety -- it seems to remind him that he is still breathing. Thus, when she starts to date the exec, Troy feels a bit intruded upon. He's got the right line -- "Did he dazzle you with his extensive knowledge of mineral water, or was it his in-depth analysis of Marky-Mark that finally reeled you in?" -- but he can't seem to make any headway. She stubbornly sticks it out with the exec for a while and lets Troy stew in his own juices. One senses, however, that her plan is that this will cause him to come to his senses and cause him (according to the Rick Miller Theory of Women announced in the outstanding and underrated Watch It) to change. She has, after all, a clear romantic attachment to Troy which is not exactly serving her well.

My friends would make for a great documentary . . . or would have, when we were all young and ridiculous

The film's gimmick (which Roger Ebert reviewed instead of reviewing the movie) is that Lelaina is a budding documentary filmmaker, so she is always filming her friends talking about their lives and their histories and their feelings about things, as well as filming them in seemingly unimportant activities like eating half-baked brownies out of a Tupperware container and discussing whether anybody has money for pizza. This serves in part as a method of exposition (as when Troy explains some of his family situation or when we follow the promiscuous Vicki to her AIDS test) and in part as a plot element itself, as when Michael becomes fascinated with Lelaina's tapes and wants to sell them to his network. (The ensuing artistic modifications present a challenge for the relationship.)

What makes the first three-quarters of this movie so good is that they contain scene after scene, and moment after moment, in which the overwound emotional dynamics of college and post-college are perfectly captured. Once people reach about twenty-five, they tend to have less screaming matches. Less fights in which everything pours out in a long stream of agony and hurt. In the film, these people are having their last few conversations like this. Troy and Lelaina are forever at each other, with him practicing tugging on her and then pushing on her, and with her constantly measuring herself against what he thinks. The honest truth is that there is just far less time for this sort of thing once everyone has a job. So I think of this movie not so much as a "Generation X" movie, because I think this phenomenon is timeless. I think of it as an anybody-in-college movie. It's not the time in our cultural history that makes this a movie people can relate to, it's the time in life. And so, as the movie dodges back and forth between moments of enormous honesty and revelation, as when Vicki discusses her fear of AIDS, and moments of falsity and game-playing, as when Vicki returns from her first date with Michael, it reveals a lot about the complexity of these dynamics but also hints that the best thing to do is often to devote less time to them.

Is the movie too pretentious and chatty? Sure. Is it whiny at times, and are these people sometimes self-absorbed? Sure. Again, I would emphasize that these kids are right at the part of life where you become responsible for more than just not getting in trouble, which is pretty much your number-one job until you're out of school. Does it have a deserved reputation for some overwrought dialogue? Absolutely. Does that take away from its copious moments of genuine insight? Not for me.

I hate this guy. I mean, in real life, at twenty, I would have fallen in love with him, but I hate this guy.

What's more, Ethan Hawke's performance is utterly brilliant, I am here to tell you. This kind of edgy, not-self-aware character who sees himself one way -- call it "Wounded Rebel" -- and is in fact another way entirely -- call it "Arrogant Pig" -- is terribly difficult to pull off. In fact, the characterization is so subtle that the guy is almost appealing. the performance Hawke gives in this film should be far more admired than it is, because it contains far more truth than 85% of romantic lead acting. Ryder, too, does a very fine job with this girl who is just standing on the brink of figuring out that she knows better than to be in this relationship. She has a great speech in which she begins to pour out her frustrations, saying "Don't fuck around with her [pointing to Troy's latest empty-headed girlfriend] . . . or with me. Try at something for once in your life." The film does a good job of building her character to the point where you can't help but sense that something is going to change.

It's a problem when you draw him well . . .

So where does the film go wrong? It goes wrong because it sets up these characters so beautifully and defines them so well, and then has them do things that make no sense. The movie knows what it is doing right up to and including the day after Troy and Lainie's inevitable sexual encounter, at which time he deserts her and runs off to play with his band. It knows what is doing up to and including a really excellent scene at the club where the band is rehearsing, in which Troy attempts to apologize, but only in the context of a continued desperate attempt at backpedaling. Lainie suddenly realizes what she really already knew, which is that this was not a good idea and he is nowhere near feeling what she wants him to be feeling. She stomps her foot and, in what I think is one of Ryder's most heartfelt lines in the film, says, "I knew this was gonna happen! I knew this was gonna happen!" And she's right. And that is why smart women all over the world watch this scene and say, "Well . . . right." And so when Troy tries to reclaim her by insulting her and almost daring her to put up with him -- "I might do mean things, and I might hurt you, and I might run away without your permission and you might hate me forever and I know that that scares the shit out of you because I'm the only real thing that you have" -- she comes up with the right answer (hooray!), which is that that, if true, is incredibly depressing.

Not to try to improve on a perfectly good exit line, and not to be indelicate, but I would suggest that her correct line is, "Fuck you."

So here is this great moment of learning and growth for this character. Lelaina has just had a light bulb go on over her head that suggests she is figuring out that perhaps it is a mistake to associate, as Troy does, "real" with "excruciating." Yes, perhaps Michael is a little dull for her, and perhaps she was only dating him as part of her ongoing sparring with Troy. Nevertheless, she is beginning to get it. She's a little like the computer in WarGames that doesn't learn it can't win playing itself at Tic-Tac-Toe until it fails to win a thousand times, but then eventually it announces, in a tired little IBM voice, "The only way to win is not to play."

. . . and then suggest he isn't that at all

The movie then goes on to entirely undermine everything it has just done. (I have read that the ending was changed to satisfy test audiences -- perhaps that's the problem. That's almost never a good thing.) Suddenly, we find ourselves watching a weakened Lelaina and a suddenly-heartbroken Troy as they mope and smoke and don't talk to each other. The movie builds to an absurd -- I'm telling you, absurd -- climactic scene in which this guy who has spent his life making sure he isn't obligated to anybody comes back on his own to stand on the front lawn of Lelaina's house and -- get this -- declare his feelings. "I have a planet of regret sitting on my shoulders," he begins. He-llo? This is the same guy who promised a little while ago that he would "do mean things to you," "hurt you," and "run away without your permission," and now all of a sudden he has a planet of regret?

Come on, I holler at the screen, tell him to go to hell. It's time.

But before she can tell him to go to hell, he explains that his father has died, and he has thus had an "arcane glimpse at the universe." Excuse me? An arcane glimpse? She's known the guy for years, obviously, and he's never seemed any more aware of the existence of other people's feelings than an ant is aware of the beginning of the new season of The X-Files, and now he's experienced an arcane glimpse? From one painful event? Certainly, this would have been a painful event, but the sad thing is that in most cases, a painful event such as this reinforces, and does not cure, the problems with this kind of person. The movie goes on, blissfully unaware that it has just sabotaged quite a bit of terrific work by a couple of marvelous and skilled young actors.

He came back to tell her, he says, that he loves her.

Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You see, this movie has just done probably the most masterful job I have ever seen displaying the behavior of the emotionally unavailable. And there's a thing about the emotionally unavailable -- emotionally speaking, they tend to be unavailable. Not "difficult," not "challenging," not "time-consuming." Unavailable. So to have this guy show up and spontaneously announce himself in this manner is completely and utterly ridiculous. What makes the unavailable unavailable is that there is, in the end, no love scene on the front lawn.

Thus, the movie takes what could have been a very real and very moving theme -- known as Sometimes One Must Grit One's Teeth, Say Hell With You, and Move On -- and transformed it into the ever-so-slightly different If You Wait Long Enough and Suffer a Really Really Lot, Eventually You Will Hear a Speech in Which a Planet of Regret is Mentioned. Oh, boooooooo.

So as far as I'm concerned, a lot of fine, fine acting and good dialogue goes utterly to waste in this story in which the entire point is betrayed by the last few scenes. If you must watch it, perhaps you should turn it off after Michael and Troy have their discussion outside the club in which the "Alas, poor Yorick" speech is referenced (that's a very funny moment, by the way). At that point, you have learned all you are going to learn, and you are about to see what seems to be an ending written by a seventeen-year-old girl tacked onto a script written by a thirty-year-old woman.

It's a real shame.