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R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 02/20/1997,

Blight night

Linklater meets Bogosian in subUrbia

by Alicia Potter

SUBURBIA. Directed by Richard Linklater. Written by Eric Bogosian. With Giovanni Ribisi, Steve Zahn, Amie Carey, Samia Shoaib, Ajay Naidu, Nicky Katt, Dina Spybey, Jayce Bartok, and Parker Posey. A Castle Rock Entertainment release. At the Kendall Square.

Open wide for a Big Gulp of angst. Generation Vexed is back in Before Sunrise director Richard Linklater's unusually dark new film about twentynothings hanging out at a suburban convenience store. Despite the strains of a collective whine, subUrbia is not all anguish and Airwalks. With an ALT=[subUrbia] width=195 height=200 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5> electric cast and ferocious script by playwright Eric Bogosian, Linklater's fourth outing turns an honest, insightful eye on that at once liberating and paralyzing limbo land known as post-adolescence.

 

Click for an interview with director Richard Linklater.

 

The film opens in Burnfield, USA, an asphalt anywhere of strip malls, fast-food joints, and tract housing. As dusk falls, the usuals gather at "the Corner" outside the local convenience store. There's Jeff (Giovanni Ribisi), a sensitive Sartre in Doc Martens; Tim (Nicky Katt), a fascist cynic; Buff (Steve Zahn), film's funniest bonehead since Sean Penn's Spicoli; punky artist Sooze (Amie Carey); and Bee-Bee (Dina Spybey), a sparrow of a girl with big problems. Their umpteenth night of boozy, existential posturing is disrupted by the return of high-school chum Pony (played with blown-dry vapidity by Jayce Bartok), whose band are gunning for a gold record. The proverbial One Who Escaped, this rocker steps out of his stretch limo and immediately trips on his MTV ego. His Hootie-esque fame divides the Corner gang. Some mock it as one more reason to spit bile at an unfair world; others cling to it as hope of life beyond community college and a twin bed at Mom and Dad's. As jealousy, alienation, and racial tensions between the parking-lot denizens and the store's Pakistani owners (Ajay Naidu and Samia Shoaib) simmer, Linklater proves once again that a hell of a lot can change in just one night.

The unflinchingly raw screenplay by Bogosian (a baby-boomer well versed in tortured existence) offers no inane retro-banter about Ginger versus Mary Ann or Ponch versus Jon. However, there is plenty of affected, post-Reaganomic bellyaching. Although the film identifies with the anguish of the Urban Outfitters crowd, it does not refrain from rattling the generation for its fickle conscience and muddled ideals. Even Jeff, the well-intentioned, rambling voice of reason, is far from flawless. He waxes Tom Joad-like about Third World hunger and his "duty as a human being to be pissed off" while tolerating pals with blatantly racist and misogynist views.

The characters are archetypal but complex enough to sidestep stereotype. Tim injects an unnerving sinisterism into the group as the Air Force dropout shackled to a gridiron-hero past. His anarchy smacks into Jeff's idealism, and the curious friendship sets up the ideological extremes around which the other characters orbit. In one scene, Tim strips the façade of Pony's spoiled publicist, Erica (Parker Posey), with chilling accuracy. She, in turn, offers to strip her designer separates in an ode to the maddening appeal of a vulnerable asshole.

Except for indie omnipresence Posey, the cast is an ensemble of relatively unknown but gifted rising stars. Amie Carey as Sooze radiates starry-eyed ambition with her Chiclet-tooth grin and sparkling energy. Her Busby-Berkeley-meets-William-S.-Burroughs performance art is at once a humorously absurd feminist statement and an agonizingly sincere stab at personal expression. Likewise, Zahn as the hyperactive "postmodern idiot savant" Buff is a scene stealer. Whether he's humping a car or drunkenly snuggling up to a lawn gnome, he's ever the lovable pig (if there is such a thing).

For Linklater the film is a marked departure from the sprawling storytelling of 1991's Slacker and 1993's Dazed and Confused. To echo the feelings of entrapment, the director sandwiches his predominantly tight, spare shots between fluid stretches of suburban blight. But he struggles at points with the jump from stage to screen. Some scenes, particularly those dealing with Bee-Bee's addictions, dip into melodrama, and a handful of theatrical lines tumble out with a thud.

Of course, if the Boston Globe's "Whatever" column can ruin your Saturday, or you pathologically avoid the Tower Records block of Newbury Street, this is not your movie. Funny, familiar, and powerful, the film chips away at the jadedness of youth; by the time the sun starts to climb, it's cracked open a generation's potential for inspired clarity. Linklater's subUrbia may not be a nice place to live, but it's an enlightening place to visit.

Visiting subUrbia

Director Richard Linklater is haunted by soul-killing architecture. "Ever since doing this movie it's been kind of creepy. I thought I could exorcise it from my system, but I feel like I can't get it out. I'm just driving and I notice the strip malls and the houses, and I think, `Aargh! I'm living the opening credit sequence of subUrbia!' "

Indeed, the director had no idea he'd get trapped in a Twilight Zone of concrete and chain link when he caught Eric Bogosian's play in 1994. He did, however, recognize the sellout show's big-screen potential. But it was not until a year later that Linklater met the curly-haired provocateur and pitched a collaboration. The result is the first film Linklater has not written himself.

"It was a progression for me personally to go to work on something that didn't originate with me. In the play Suburbia, I kind of knew those characters or had been them and knew that world. But for me cinematically it was a real challenge to try to adapt that into a film. It's so dramatic; it works so well on the stage. But I just began putting the play through my own system as a filmmaker, through my own methods of how to make a film. I thought it naturally lent itself to a movie."

Notwithstanding idealist antihero Jeff's vow to "Fuck fear!", Linklater does not ascribe to fearless filmmaking. "I was kind of afraid of it [subUrbia]. It's easy when it's all over to sit back and act like you're really calm about it. It was a big challenge. But I think it's good to enter into a film being sort of afraid. I do that with every film."

The 35-year-old Linklater swears subUrbia is the last chapter in his "hanging out" oeuvre, which covers the talky sleepers Slacker (1991), Dazed and Confused (1993), and Before Sunrise (1995). "My films have actually been getting shorter," he insists. "Slacker was a full 24 hours. They've been getting shorter by a few hours each time. It's just a different kind of storytelling I've been leading up to. subUrbia has been a good bridge, because it's much more dramatic and structured."

What was it like working with the notoriously intense Bogosian? "He's very collaborative. He's got this fierce intelligence. I felt incredibly responsible to Eric. I don't care if everybody else hates the film; if Eric likes it, I've done something. That means everything to me." In fact, the brooding adaptation received a thumbs up from the playwright/comedian.

Both director and writer survived suburban childhoods, Linklater in East Texas, Bogosian in Woburn. Says Linklater, "The suburbs are more a state of mind. It's not just geography. I don't know how much of an impact location really has. I don't think in subUrbia I'm critical of the location in that it equals these characters' problems: who they are, how they're dealing with their lives at that point. It's more about life at 20 than about living in the suburbs."

He singles out Jeff as the character with whom he most closely identifies. But now that he's a big-time director, didn't Pony's rock-star homecoming strike a familiar chord? "First of all, I never left where I live in Austin. I was always there. And it's not the same in film. It might be for an actor, but it's not for a director."

What about the black stretch limo parked in front of the Four Seasons, the site of the director's Boston stay and, coincidentally, the same posh digs where Pony enjoys "a bed and hot water" in the film?

"I think I came in a town car today," Linklater laughs. "Limos are embarrassing."

-- AP