The People On The Bus Go Down And Down

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A couple weeks back on Twitter I bitched a little bit about some movie critics not doing their jobs and just stating the obvious and pretending that was a way to wrestle with a movie that for good or worse was worth wrestling with. I didn't really like William Friedkin's Killer Joe (Gena Gershon excepted) but it's a pretty fascinating ball of rancid, and Friedkin is fully aware that he's sticking his thumb in your eye, and to just whine that you don't like having a thumb in your eye is just wasting our time, you know? Nobody likes having a thumb in their eye! Why he felt the need to place his thumb there - that though, that is kinda interesting!

Which brings me to Michel Gondry's The We and the I. I'm having to remind myself of my own advice here, because my gut reaction is really rallying for me to write the movie off because of how insufferable I found the experience. But Michel Gondry's not a fool, and I don't think he's clueless about where he's plunking us down and who he's forcing us to relate to. He isn't really trying to let these kids off the hook for their horrible behavior - he's just pointing a camera at it.

I think this flick probably cuts a little close to the bone for me because living in a big city like I do I am plunked down into the situation depicted here on a near daily basis and man alive I don't have the patience for it anymore. If I happen upon a subway train filled with teenagers who've just gotten out of school, I move to another car in the train now. Period. This movie, it doesn't let you move. You're stuck with this rabid pack of hormones and nastiness for an hour and a half. As such, I think it's an honest film - it wallows in the cruelty of teenage pack mentality with unflinching eyes. And with all the anti-bullying sentiment in the air these days, it does feel gutsy to face down teenage meanness like this, without the vapid sentimentality of A Very Special Episode Of Glee where we find out the bullies Just Aren't Loved At Home. A lot of these kids are little pricks just because they can be.

But in the end things do get a little bit trite, and I don't know that Gondry ever really digs up much profundity from the experience - certainly not enough to justify sitting through ninety minutes of shitheads going comeuppance-free while occasionally being asked to sympathize for them. Yes, in real life shitheads go comeuppance-free all the time, better believe I know this - but I need something more out of art, you know? The idea of the public self versus the private self, especially in terms of high schoolers, isn't ultimately enough to hang this exhausting experience on. As a snapshot of What Kids Are Like Today it might be onto something, but I think I've just graduated into Grumpy Old Man at this point.
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