Writer/director Michael Goldbach throws a whole lot of stuff against the wall in Daydream Nation and quite a bit of it sticks. He also demonstrates the unstated problem with that old idiom. Who wants a wall with a bunch of random stuff stuck to it? There are parts of this film that are funny and parts that flirt with meaning and parts that brush up against truthful insight. None of it adds up to anything, however, and other parts of the movie are either pointless or disappointing. It's not a bad way to kill 98 minutes but it's nothing that will stick with you after that 98th minute is over.
Caroline Wexler (Kat Dennings) is the star and narrator of the show. She's a high school girl who's widowed father has dragged her from the big city to a small town, although that's one of the biggest bits of stuff that doesn't stick to the wall. I grew up in a small town. Well, I grew up on a farm outside a small town. I went to a high school that took the students from two small towns. Neither town had its own movie theater and my graduating class had about 40 kids in it. THAT'S a small town. The setting of Daydream Nation is only "small" from the perspective of someone from New York or Chicago. Caroline's classmates have easy access to seemingly any narcotic they want and she has to pass through a metal detector to get to class. Hardly the trappings of a naïve or sheltered existence, yet a great deal of this tale is based on Caroline being so much more worldly and jaded than everyone else her age. It's a false note and it's not the only one that sounds in the otherwise entertaining tune of this motion picture.
At the core of Daydream Nation is Caroline seducing her English teacher Mr. Anderson (Josh Lucas) while gradually succumbing herself to the awkward charms of her stoner classmate Thurston Goldberg (Reece Thompson). There's a lot, and I mean a lot, of periphery jazz orbiting around that love triangle, including the first crush of Thurston's little sister, the fall-rise-and-fall again of one of Thurston's stoner buddies, an abortive relationship between Caroline's dad and Thurston's mom, a guileless high school girl whom writer/director Goldbach uses as a target for his disdain and anger for people who aren't like himself, an anti-drunk driving PSA an industrial fire and a white-suited serial killer. Some of it's amusing and some of it just clutters up the place, but it's Anderson-Caroline-Thurston that is the heart of this movie.
Two-thirds of it beats quite nicely. Caroline is a wonderfully written young woman who's at that point in adolescence where she can't distinguish between who she really is and the act she puts on for everyone else. She's smart, but not as smart as she thinks. She's sarcastic, but not as bitter as she thinks. She thinks she's mature, but it's mostly a girl's concept of maturity. Thurston is a dead on avatar of teenage male cluelessness and unfocused drive. He knows he wants to be with Caroline but hasn't the slightest idea how to achieve it, only that he's not going to let her pretenses at sophistication put him off the trail.
Anderson, though, has an irregular rhythm. He starts out just as smartly drawn as the other two. His reaction to Caroline's advances is exactly the way you'd hope a grown man would respond. He knows what she's doing and is more bemused by her audacity than titillated by the prospect of young flesh. In their early scenes together, she's pretending to be grown up while he really is. When they do fall into bed, it's easy to forgive because Kat Dennings is pretty hot, she doesn't really look that young and Josh Lucas doesn't really look that old. Then Anderson has Caroline read his 70 page novel, which is autobiographical, and he reveals himself to be a pathetic failure consumed with neurotic angst. But that's not at all whom the character is in the beginning and his transformation isn't gradual or observable by the audience. He's one kind of person. She reads his novella. He becomes a completely different kind of person. There's no reality to Anderson for the second half of the film. He's becomes another receptacle of Goldbach's contempt of "small" towns and the "small" people in them.
If that sort of rage and disgust had permeated the whole film, perhaps it would have given Daydream Nation a unifying theme and tied it all together, rather than letting much of it flail about. Instead, the tone and tenor of most of the movie is gauzy and cushiony. The best thing about it is the accuracy of its emotion and behavior, but Goldbach is always pulling back and keeping an ironic/disengaged distance from it all. It's a motion picture about the messiness of life that keeps everything too neat and tidy.
I'd give it 6 stars out of 10 for the performances of Kat Dennings and Reece Thompson and for offering up a relatively dense narrative. There are enough things that clang wrong here to prevent anything higher than that.
Caroline Wexler (Kat Dennings) is the star and narrator of the show. She's a high school girl who's widowed father has dragged her from the big city to a small town, although that's one of the biggest bits of stuff that doesn't stick to the wall. I grew up in a small town. Well, I grew up on a farm outside a small town. I went to a high school that took the students from two small towns. Neither town had its own movie theater and my graduating class had about 40 kids in it. THAT'S a small town. The setting of Daydream Nation is only "small" from the perspective of someone from New York or Chicago. Caroline's classmates have easy access to seemingly any narcotic they want and she has to pass through a metal detector to get to class. Hardly the trappings of a naïve or sheltered existence, yet a great deal of this tale is based on Caroline being so much more worldly and jaded than everyone else her age. It's a false note and it's not the only one that sounds in the otherwise entertaining tune of this motion picture.
At the core of Daydream Nation is Caroline seducing her English teacher Mr. Anderson (Josh Lucas) while gradually succumbing herself to the awkward charms of her stoner classmate Thurston Goldberg (Reece Thompson). There's a lot, and I mean a lot, of periphery jazz orbiting around that love triangle, including the first crush of Thurston's little sister, the fall-rise-and-fall again of one of Thurston's stoner buddies, an abortive relationship between Caroline's dad and Thurston's mom, a guileless high school girl whom writer/director Goldbach uses as a target for his disdain and anger for people who aren't like himself, an anti-drunk driving PSA an industrial fire and a white-suited serial killer. Some of it's amusing and some of it just clutters up the place, but it's Anderson-Caroline-Thurston that is the heart of this movie.
Two-thirds of it beats quite nicely. Caroline is a wonderfully written young woman who's at that point in adolescence where she can't distinguish between who she really is and the act she puts on for everyone else. She's smart, but not as smart as she thinks. She's sarcastic, but not as bitter as she thinks. She thinks she's mature, but it's mostly a girl's concept of maturity. Thurston is a dead on avatar of teenage male cluelessness and unfocused drive. He knows he wants to be with Caroline but hasn't the slightest idea how to achieve it, only that he's not going to let her pretenses at sophistication put him off the trail.
Anderson, though, has an irregular rhythm. He starts out just as smartly drawn as the other two. His reaction to Caroline's advances is exactly the way you'd hope a grown man would respond. He knows what she's doing and is more bemused by her audacity than titillated by the prospect of young flesh. In their early scenes together, she's pretending to be grown up while he really is. When they do fall into bed, it's easy to forgive because Kat Dennings is pretty hot, she doesn't really look that young and Josh Lucas doesn't really look that old. Then Anderson has Caroline read his 70 page novel, which is autobiographical, and he reveals himself to be a pathetic failure consumed with neurotic angst. But that's not at all whom the character is in the beginning and his transformation isn't gradual or observable by the audience. He's one kind of person. She reads his novella. He becomes a completely different kind of person. There's no reality to Anderson for the second half of the film. He's becomes another receptacle of Goldbach's contempt of "small" towns and the "small" people in them.
If that sort of rage and disgust had permeated the whole film, perhaps it would have given Daydream Nation a unifying theme and tied it all together, rather than letting much of it flail about. Instead, the tone and tenor of most of the movie is gauzy and cushiony. The best thing about it is the accuracy of its emotion and behavior, but Goldbach is always pulling back and keeping an ironic/disengaged distance from it all. It's a motion picture about the messiness of life that keeps everything too neat and tidy.
I'd give it 6 stars out of 10 for the performances of Kat Dennings and Reece Thompson and for offering up a relatively dense narrative. There are enough things that clang wrong here to prevent anything higher than that.