Going the Distance: Separation Anxiety

Barrymore and her boytoy are bicoastal lovers in Going the Distance

By Pamela Zoslov

The lengthy running time (102 minutes) of Going the Distance, a romantic comedy starring Drew Barrymore and her current boyfriend, Justin Long, coupled with its wearily predictable ending, allows the viewer ample time to think about the relentless demands of commercial moviemaking. In this case, a gifted documentary filmmaker, Nanette Burstein, whose portraits of young boxers (On the Ropes) and high school students (American Teen) were noteworthy for their emotional realism, is given the difficult task of making something new and different from the formulaic story of a couple separated by miles and trying to make a long-distance relationship work. With first-time screenwriter Geoff LaTulippe, Burstein tries mightily to bring some believability to the story — witty, improvisational-style dialogue, an acknowledgement of the sagging recessionary job market — only to be largely defeated by the necessary clichés of the Hollywood rom-com.

One necessary evil is the casting. Barrymore, never quite as talented or charming as her family legacy implies, looks a bit haggard for the ingénue role she’s playing, and Long has a long way to go before being considered leading-man material. Barrymore and Long, despite being a real-life couple, generate little charisma or erotic heat. Barrymore plays Erin, a clever 31-year-old graduate student who is a superannuated intern for a mythical New York newspaper, the “New York Sentinel.” She meets Garrett (Long), an indie record-company employee freshly dumped by his girlfriend, and they bond over shared interests in circa-1980s music and vintage arcade video games. Their budding romance is narrated with the help of a montage of New York romantic cavorting, in which Burstein resurrects split-screen techniques that hark back to Pillow Talk. Six weeks into this romantic idyll, Erin must return to California to finish school (Stanford, no less), leaving Garrett to his goofy pals Dan (Charlie Day) and Box (Jason Sudeikis) and his unrealistic music-industry job.

Another necessary evil is plot mechanics, which require a labored exposition of the challenges of Erin and Garrett’s separation, handled with frequent phone calls, texts, split-screen guffaws over a sneezing-panda YouTube video, sexual jealousy, comically failed phone sex, and occasional sex-charged reunions. Since the couple are less interesting than the supporting characters — the funny Sudeikis and Day, and lovely Christina Applegate (Married With Children) as Erin’s sister, who’s saddled with the sole unfunny trait of being a hygiene freak — our emotional investment in the couple’s eventual success is limited.

The relationship reaches a crisis point when Erin, attempting the quixotic feat of obtaining a full-time job as a newspaper reporter, receives an offer from a major paper that will keep her on the West Coast, leaving Garrett to sulk petulantly in his dumpy Manhattan apartment and consider seeking solace with a pretty co-worker (Kelli Garner). Burstein and LaTulippe’s efforts to bring realism to the rom-com is again subverted: with one hand the movie acknowledges that newspapers are going the way of the buggy whip, and with the other performs a bit of movie magic as dated as the 1980s-style music of the bands the couple enjoy.

Overlong and meandering, the movie has trouble maintaining a consistent tone. Naturalistic scenes reside uncomfortably beside slapstick sequences — Garrett dodging wild spray at a fake-tan salon, Erin and Garrett caught screwing on her sister’s dining-room table. And yet, with all its problems, the movie has an appealing texture. The jokey, sub-Judd Apatow banter, unusually frank sexual dialogue (feisty Erin lamenting the problems of men dawdling while performing oral sex, or screaming “Suck my dick!” drunkenly at an angry biker in a bar), strong supporting cast and general amiability liberate the movie somewhat from its genre-dictated confines.

Originally published in Cleveland Scene.

Teenage Wasteland

The characters in American Teen seem like stock figures from a high school comedy: the stuck-up prom queen, the ambitious jock, the pimply nerd, the misunderstood artist. It’s Mean Girls, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Revenge of the Nerds. But American Teen is a documentary, and the kids are real. That their stories conform to the tropes of teen movies demonstrates that these narratives are universal, rolling around somewhere in our collective unconscious.

Nanette Burstein, who co-directed The Kid Stays in the Picture, a biography of movie producer Robert Evans, made American Teen by living for ten months among a group of high-school seniors in Warsaw, Indiana. She filmed the kids constantly, capturing their dreams, struggles, misdeeds and occasional triumphs. The result was a staggering 1,000 hours of footage, which over a year she pared down to 95 minutes. The result is a superbly made, absorbing look at modern middle-American youth.

Burstein was influenced by Seventeen, an edgy PBS documentary centering on Indiana high school students. That film focused on issues like interracial dating, while American Teen is more concerned with social dynamics and the pressures placed on teenagers by their anxious parents.

Burstein selected a high school in Warsaw, a small northern Indiana town described by one student as “your typical Midwestern town, white, Christian, red state, middle-class all the way.” The town has only one high school, which means that Mercedes-driving students attend alongside students of more modest means. The social order, says one girl, is “a total caste system.”

The top caste is represented by Megan, homecoming queen and student council climber whose personality appears to be modeled on Tracy Flick from Election: ruthless, arrogant, “a total bitch.” And, of course, very popular among her posse of friends.

ehind Megan’s imperious façade lurks an insecure girl whose parents expect her to be accepted by the competitive University of Notre Dame, Dad’s alma mater. The film hints at darker family dynamics. Megan weeps while recalling the suicide of her learning-disabled sister, who struggled to live up to her parents’ demands.

Colin, an easygoing athlete, is also under duress from his dad, who moonlights as an Elvis impersonator. Basketball is a religion in the Hoosier state, and Colin was conditioned since toddlerhood to be a hoops star. Dad, counting on a basketball scholarship to pay for college, urges Colin to score big at games to impress college recruiters. Colin hogs the ball, and the team loses until he learns to be a team player. The film reminds us that college has become unaffordable for many families; Colin’s dad suggests that if he doesn’t get the scholarship, he can always join the military.

At the other end of the social spectrum is Jake, a classic geek with a bad complexion. He has two obsessions: video games and girls: “If I have a girl, I don’t feel like such a nobody.” During the film he goes through several relationships, proving that looks don’t matter, it’s persistence that pays off.

The most affecting story belongs to free-spirited Hannah, a bundle of creative energy who paints, photographs, plays guitar and dreams of becoming a film director. Painfully out of place in rural Indiana, Hannah is, like many inmates of landlocked Corn Belt states, desperate to leave for the coast, any coast. When a boyfriend breaks up with her, she plunges into a depression that leaves her terrified of going to school. In one of several animated sequences, the film explores Hannah’s haunting fear that she is becoming mentally ill like her mom, who is bipolar.

Hannah’s life takes a surprising turn when Geoff, a popular athlete, takes an interest in her. He waxes enthusiastic about how “different” she is, but his ardor soon caves under the pressure of the social hierarchy, which cannot be defied. He breaks up with her via text message.

Viral technology, in fact, is one thing that distinguishes this generation from its predecessors. In a moment of youthful exuberance, a girl sends a topless picture of herself to a boy. Within minutes, the photo has reached every computer and cell phone in the student body. The girl is cruelly harassed (“superskanky,” “pepperoni nipples”) and driven to tears. It’s Lord of the Flies, aided and abetted by the Internet.

The stories are dramatic, which makes you wonder if Burstein was merely lucky to find students whose lives were so interesting, or whether, à la Heisenberg, her presence somehow made their lives more poetic. Either way, American Teen is a first-rate documentary.

This originally appeared in Cleveland Scene.