I saw the Criterion DVD re-release of Noah Baumbach’s “Kicking & Screaming” this weekend and I have to say this film keeps getting better with age. It’s a film I originally loathed – affluent, Gen-X-y white teens with their self-involved very-90s problems got on my nerves at the time – then tolerated, then I fully came to appreciate and enjoy it.
The film is all about dialogue though and I think the reason I disliked it so much initially is that it’s totally flat direction-wise – covered in all master shots without any inventive camera moves at all. But one assumes on a shoe-string budget, Baumbach probably had to just cover things as quickly as possible without too many different and time-consuming (i.e. time equals money) camera set-ups.
It’s kind of akin to a band that has great lyrics, but h0-hum music, but perhaps after a while all of it grows on you.
It’s funny, I had just finished, my imaginary, “If I Were Noah Baumbach” playlist, but I had totally forgotten about the music in the film (I was really thinking more about “Squid & the Whale”). The Pixes’ “Cecilia Ann” kicks off the film, there’s a bunch of country crooner Jimmie Dale Gilmore songs, including two songs he composed specifically for the film (Which? Not sure. Incidentally, Gilmore plays “Smokey,” the gentle “pacifist” bowling league player who almost gets killed by John Goodman in “The Big Lebowski”), Nick Drake’s “Time of No Reply,” and a bunch of Freedy Johnston songs. There’s even a song “written” by Noah Baumbach, Nicci Sun (“In This Heart of Darkness”) and performed by the amazing Chris Eigeman. I say “written,” because Eigeman is supposed to sing dialogue in the movie during a scene when he’s bored out of his mind staring at his books (hence the Conrad novel), but Baumbach’s music supervisor was worried about getting sued if Eigeman improved anything remotely similar to a pre-recorded song, so they “wrote” a little melody for him to sing (and Eigeman was completely embarrassed to sing in falsetto).
The original score, by Phil Marshall and Will Baum in the flashback sequences – very plaintive, but emotive guitar and keyboard drones – is surprisingly moving as well.
I totally forgot that Beck’s wife, Marisa Ribisi, also has a tiny, tiny part in the film as well.
