In the interest of getting “hard” copies of my work under one roof, I plan to spend the next few weeks posting the entire archive of my film journalism here on ScullyVision. With due respect to the many publications I’ve written for, the internet remains quite temporary, and I’d hate to see any of my work disappear for digital reasons. As such, this gargantuan project must begin! I don’t want to do it. I hate doing it. But it needs to be done. Please note that my opinions, like everyone’s, have changed a LOT since I started, so many of these reviews will only represent a snapshot in time. Objectivity has absolutely no place in film criticism, at least not how I do it.
Originally posted on Cinema76.
When I was in high school I considered myself two things: a hopeless romantic and a punk rocker. Regarding the former, the wisdom that comes with age has taught me that I wasn’t “hopelessly romantic” so much as I was “entitled and pathetic.” And as for the latter, well, I still love Blink-182, but they’re hardly the band you want to cite when trying to co-opt the image of the anti-establishment musician who does not give a fuck about anything but not giving a fuck. Needless to say, had Dinner in America been released when I was 15, I’d have lost my mind for it in a big way.
The good news is, even now as a man in his thirties whose knowledge of punk rock and romance is still very basic, Dinner in America worked wonders on me. In fact, it worked even better than it would have had I still been an angsty teen, as I’m now equipped to take something less anarchic away from its realistically complicated thematics. As funny as it is charming, and as charming as it is crass, this alternative take on “boy meets girl/girl meets boy” takes the pieces of genre iconography that we all know and love, and gives them an off-color flavor filled with attitude, angst, and the most hilarious use of a feline corpse I’ve ever seen (and as a genre fan, I’ve seen a few).
Kyle Gallner plays Simon, an angry addict who earns money by participating in drug trials and taking advantage of anybody unfortunate enough to cross his path. He’s dirty, temperamental, and bubbling over with disdain for anything or anyone who thinks they can control him, guide him, or even just look at him for too long. He’s selfish and mean, and utterly refuses to back down from anything, seemingly for no other reason than ego. At the outset, he seems to be rotten to the core, so it’s no wonder that the super sanitized Patty (Emily Skeggs) finds herself enamored with him when he waltzes into her life by chance one day while hiding from the cops in the same back alley where she takes her lunch break.
A bit about Patty. She’s quiet, weird, and medicated beyond belief. Her family is very protective over her, and their passive aggressive mode of parenting is both cluelessly polite and plainly damaging to Patty’s well-being. She’d love to go to a concert this weekend, but her parents aren’t too fond of the idea. Mom (Mary Lynn Rajskub) seems to desire the typical housewife role, always interested in advertising her own cooking process and using the withholding of dessert as a form of behavioral management. Dad (Pat Healy) is quite repressed as well, showing a desire to live a bigger life, but feeling weighed down by the responsibilities of his chosen role. These are grand assumptions I’m making, drawn from what is relatively very little screen time, but I bring them up because they are the perfect example of the way most of the supporting cast is presented in this film. While Simon and Patty get to know one another, leaving a ton of trouble in their wake, we can see just why the notion of rebellion takes within our heroes, especially Patty. Everyone in her world is either passive-aggressive, or just plain aggressive. Bullies are loud, mean, and high in number. Authority figures are demonstrably clueless. Boys her age are all a bunch of rapey horndogs, and the girls are all image-obsessed jerks.
It’s an oddly aggro world in which Dinner in America takes place, and at the same time that the environment motivates the rebellious behaviors of our protagonists, it also provides for a constant parade of laughter. Outside of the few moments of heavy drama or cheeky romance, almost every line reading, facial expression, or situation is played for some sort of bizarre humor, and nearly all of it works. A weakness in this approach is that the world feels less real due to its heightened nature, which can occasionally undercut the previously referenced motivation — when one half of your leading duo is clearly taking advantage of the other, and is doing so in a world where consequences are mostly avenues toward humor, the film intermittently dips into an uncomfortable ethical territory, but I am convinced that this is a choice rather than an oversight. Complicated feelings toward art are increasingly few and far between in a time where audiences demand black and white depictions of good and evil, so struggling with the ethics of the characters is an experience I welcome with open arms.
Writer/director/editor Adam Rehmeier does an impressive job keeping the film alive and energetic, especially since it’s such a small, local story. Balancing so many subsequent plot lines without bogging down the film is no small feat, and short of a few cuts which could be made here and there, the pace never drags. And while the tone often swings pretty wildly moment to moment, it’s handled with such an anarchic grace that I found myself on board for every tonal switch, no matter how quickly it came.
The real winners here are Skeggs and Gallner. Their alt-Bonnie & Clyde experience could easily be told through tropey, cartoony characters, but neither performer settles for such low-grade ideas. Instead they give us colorful, dense characters with compelling, intertwined arcs. Gallner is positively deranged as Simon, and Simon, dumbfuck that he is, evokes in the viewer a complicated empathy. Skeggs could have easily disappeared behind Gallner’s larger than life performance, but her Patty, who also functions as the audience surrogate, is just remarkable. Yeah, Patty is strange, but she’s never ashamed of this fact. If Simon teaches her to be a better self-advocate, Patty teaches him that he’s much more concerned with image than he could have ever expected. Watching the two reciprocally break each other open, pushing one another beyond what is expected of each is a deeply emotional joy, and it’s one that is very well-earned by the script.
I don’t know where to put it, but the score by John Swihart (Napoleon Dynamite) is killer. By giving the film a groovy, digital audio backdrop, it adds variety to the soundscape outside of the diegetic punk tunes featured throughout.
Dinner in America is hard to really describe, but its ability to bring the viewer into its unique flavor of storytelling means I don’t have to. Trust me when I say that you’ll want to reserve a spot for this one!
Reservations can be made at Nightstream.org
Check out Dan and Garrett’s interview with Adam Rehmeier on the latest episode of I Like to Movie Movie!
