Reality Bites More Than It Can Chew

FILM

Reality Bites

directed by Ben Stiller

starring Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, and Ben Stiller

on general release

At a crucial point in the new film "Reality Bites," Michael (Ben Stiller), an executive for the new cable network In Your Face TV--"it's like MTV, but with an edge"--is about to reveal to his fellow executives a video documentary made by aspiring young filmmaker Leleina (Winona Ryder). Leleina's documentary is about herself and her three friends Troy, Vicki, and Sammy, who all have just graduated from college and are now trying to make it in the real world. Leleina intends her video to be a serious consideration of the many issues which confront the twenty-somethings of today--you know: AIDS, homosexuality, McJobs, alternative music, cheesy television, etc.--and Michael thinks this video would be just the thing to get In Your Face TV going.

Michael tells Leleina that "some of our best guys" have been working on the video to make it suitable for broadcast, and she has high hopes. However, almost immediately after the video begins playing, Leleina realizes that her serious work has been transformed into an MTV-style mish-mash of jumpy editing, silly graphics, and meaningless buzz words topped off with a soundtrack of hip tunes. Disillusioned, she tells Michael that their relationship is over and she storms out of the building.

This episode works as a handy model for the rest of the film, because, in terms of depth of insight into "Generation X" (if there even is such a thing), it becomes hard to tell the difference among Leleina's original documentary, the In Your Face TV version, and "Reality Bites" as a whole. In each case, there is the unexamined assertion that our generation can be defined by a list of trendy issues.

Conveniently, each of the main characters embodies at least one pressing "issue." Vicki (Janeane Garofalo) works at the Gap and is scared that she has AIDS. Sammy is gay and about to come out to his mom. Troy (Ethan Hawke) is in an alternative band called Hey, That's My Bike. Michael is an ambivalent corporate climber. Leleina looks for a job at a fast-food restaurant after losing her internship at a moronic TV show. All the characters seem to have divorced parents and a deep emotional attachment to some aspect of pop culture.

Given these sketchy outlines, Stiller and Garofalo do the best jobs at making truly hip and interesting pop culture references and fleshing their characters out into funny, believable people. Stiller's Michael could have easily been a weasel, but his technological ineptitude (he still doesn't quite have the knack of driving while talking on the cellular phone), his sense of humor, and the feeling that he really cares for Leleina, make him into a nice, normal guy.

Garofalo is brilliant as Vicki. She puts an intelligent twist on the typical working-at-the-Gap scenario by having Vicki be intense, yet self-aware in her dedication to the job. After masterfully folding a sweater, she declares, "People just don't realize what it takes. They just don't". Also, she salvages the potentially tired AIDS subplot in one of the funniest scenes in the movie, in which she discusses her plight in terms of the characters of Melrose Place.

Ryder more than capably carries the film as the hip, lovable type of character she has played since "Heathers." The guy playing Sammy is great for the approximately fifteen seconds he is actually in the film.

Hawke, however, barely manages to make his character likable. Troy is supposed to represent the quintessential Generation X-er--an emotionally battered, yet keenly intelligent outsider who subsists on a steady diet of trash culture.

Nonetheless, the only evidence of Troy's intelligence is that he is always reading books with the word "being" in the title and that he knows the definition of "irony." The hippest pop culture reference he can muster is when Leleina doesn't want him to move into her apartment and he replies, "What, is Mr. Roper gonna show up?" Any character aspiring to be the defining figure of my generation should be held to a much more sophisticated standard of involvement with the "Three's Company" lexicon.

The film's final embarassing lunge at hipness comes when Troy's band performs an original song called "I'm Nothin,"' in which the opening lyrics are "I got a pothead momma/I got a cokehead dad" and it's downhill from there. Apparently, Hawke wrote this song himself and it is available on the soundtrack album.

Hawke recovers somewhat in the end of the film when he no longer has to come across as hip or intelligent and can concentrate on the emotionally battered part of the role Unfortunately, much of the damage to the film has already been done.

All pretense to generational relevance aside, at its core, "Reality Bites" is basically a standard love triangle story, in which Leleina has to choose between the more stable Michael and the less stable Troy. It's kind of like "The Piano," except Ben Stiller is a lot funnier than Sam Neill and Ethan Hawke doesn't have any visible tattos.

Troy's basic unappealingness doesn't help here either, but a simple love story isn't as hard to do as an intelligent examination of modern times. No one ever settles for the normal guy and in this aspect the film is most successful.

However, there is still the problem that people will take this as the last word on the college-age folks of our times. If "Reality Bites" becomes this generation's "The Graduate," it would be a sad state of affairs indeed.