This is the first post in the 90 from the 90s series, exploring underrated flicks from one of the great movie decades. To be eligible for this series, movies must have been released January 1, 1990 – December 31, 1999, and earned less than $20 million at the U.S. box office.
Released in October 1995 at the height of the independent movie boom, Noah Baumbach’s writing and directing debut, Kicking and Screaming (not to be confused with the ampersanded 2005 Will Ferrell soccer comedy Kicking & Screaming), grossed just over $700K at the U.S. box office. But, like so many movies in the 90s, the film found continued life on home video and cable.
Key Moment
Forlorn college graduate Grover (Josh Hamilton) awkwardly fools around with a redheaded undergrad in her tiny single bed. When Grover realizes he doesn’t have a condom, it sets off a screwball chain reaction involving the redhead’s roommate and her boyfriend (sleeping naked only a few feet away), a spilled bong, and a new level of self-loathing.
Killer Line
“What I used to be able to pass off as a bad summer can now potentially turn into a bad life.”
Standout Player
Chris Eigeman as Max. He gets many of the film’s best lines (including the one above) and delivers them with a weary, intellectual aplomb that never feels like acting.
Big Picture
While Kicking and Screaming is in essence a “college comedy”—albeit a tweed jacket one compared with Animal House’s dirty sweatshirt—there’s an idea at play here that transcends the movie’s collegiate confines: Sometimes in order to move on to the next stage of life you first have to cling to the previous one with mad, illogical desperation; like nothing could pry it from your cold, dead hands.
That’s the basic premise of Kicking and Screaming, where rather than drive forward with their lives, the four friends at the core of the film try to throw it in reverse until the wheels fall off. They’re actively trying to live nostalgically, viewing the present as the past, and continually bumping up into the limitations of that approach.
“You know what I wish? I wish we were just going off to war. Or retiring. I wish I was just retiring after a lifetime of hard labor,” Max (Chris Eigeman) states early in the movie. Later he says: “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now.”
He whips off that last line with disdain, but in reality it’s like a mission statement, representative of the group’s mentality. Let’s live this moment like we have traveled back in time to experience it again, rather than actually experiencing it.
Wanting to latch on to a phase of your life as it slips away is universal—whether you’re 23, 43, or 63. Baumbach himself has made something of a career out of exploring this idea. Greenberg, Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha, the recent Jay Kelly, and (probably most explicitly) While We’re Young are all about people trying desperately to hang on to a stage of life that’s coming to an end.
While this is Baumbach’s writing and directing debut, much of what have become his signatures—incisive, witty dialogue; upper-middle class melancholy—are already present in spades. And they make his debut film still worth watching and endlessly quotable 30 years later. Especially if, like me, you continue kicking and screaming every day as life drags you forward into an uncertain future.
Quick Takes
In his Criterion Closet video, Billy Crudup grabs Kicking and Screaming off the shelf and shares that he was insanely jealous that Josh Hamilton, now his good friend, got the role of Grover (he was also up for the part). It’s an interesting “what if?”—Crudup as Grover. Though I think Hamilton, who has worked steadily for the past 30 years without ever really breaking out, was the better choice.
The Park Posey indie movie run of the 1990s cannot be overstated. From 1993 to 1997 she was in more than a dozen buzzy low-budget flicks—including Dazed and Confused, Sleep With Me, The Doom Generation, Party Girl, The Daytrippers, Basquiat, Waiting for Guffman, The House of Yes, and Clockwatchers. She doesn’t have much to do in Kicking and Screaming, but she’s always fun when she’s on screen.
There’s a good amount of casual smoking in this movie, as well as actors with smoker’s teeth (a sign they were probably puffing in real life too). It’s a marker of a different time and place, and one that makes me weirdly nostalgic (not that I want all the lung cancer back).