SubUrbia

SUBURBIA   ***

Richard Linklater

1996

IDEA:  In the fictional suburb of Burnfield, USA, a desultory group of recent high school graduates hangs around behind a convenience store. Tensions rise when they're met by an old acquaintance who's become a musician in Los Angeles.

BLURB:  The characters in Richard Linklater’s Slacker may have been aimless, but they were propelled, productively or not, by intellectual and creative energies. The circuitous, vignette structure of the film - a roundelay in which one set of characters passes the narrative “baton” to another - generated continuous movement, even if it was just across the street or into a club. By contrast, many of the small cast of characters in SubUrbia are well and truly stuck in place, both physically and mentally. Paralyzed by post-high school ennui and disillusionment, they fritter away their time drinking and fulminating behind a convenience store whose Pakistani owner they regularly harass. They do not possess the educational backgrounds of the Slacker kids, nor are they steeped in the fertile culture and social scene of Austin, Texas, and so their idleness and cynicism curdle into cruelty, both self-inflicted and interpersonal. SubUrbia is certainly among the bleakest films made by Linklater (that the material wasn’t created by him is telling), a portrait of young white middle-class inertia that mostly forgoes witticisms for laments, delivered into the void of an empty parking lot in the middle of the night. The execution is stagey, owing to the film’s theatrical origins, but Linklater generates tense and often surprising rhythms among his actors, all of whom play the foibles of their characters without appeasing facile audience sympathies. Sure, theirs are “First World” problems, in contemporary parlance, but they know that: for the most miserable among them, such knowledge can’t erase the discrepancy between their relative material comfort and just how purposeless they feel.