well, only so far that it is about wordy twenty-somethings and has a regular of Stillman’s stock company in a supporting role.
but it’s equally related to a bunch of those mid-nineties independent productions. they’re of the same genre, made around the same time, and have 1 actor in common, so it’s not “waaaay too much like a Whit Stillman film.”
Kicking and Screaming has a lot more in common with a film like Sleep With Me than with a Stillman film in terms of style and common actors.
I think the characters have a lot in common, but the message of the movies were entirely different; I took Metropolitan to be a sort of parodical, postmodern response to movies like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, for example, where aristocracy is cast upon negatively with this almost comical, inconsequential document.
Kicking and Screaming, on the other hand, was less a dialogue with anything in the same way Metropolitan (or any Stillman film, for that matter), than just a coming-of-age picture (overcoming post-graduate ennui, as the Criterion people put it), albeit one of immense originality in, both, the writing and the actors.
And like the above commenter pointed out, Chris Eigeman factors heavily in similar roles in both films.
If you had to compare Noah Baumbach to Stillman, better to do it with Highball or Mr. Jealousy.
Joseph:
The only reason you compare “Metropolitan” to “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” is the fact that Charlie mentions the film at a dinner-dance, claiming that when he heard the title he believed someone had actually captured the charm of the aristocracy. (The charmingly bitter Nick Smith responds, “The surrealists were a bunch of social climbers.”) It’s a self-reflexive moment: Stillman desperately wanted to capture said charm with his own debut film. But “Charm”—with its surrealist flourishes and its endlessly delayed gratifications—has no other connection to “Metropolitan,” which embraces a borderline-sentimental sort of neo-19th-century realism. With all of its nods to Jane Austen and its sanitized Christmas-in-Manhattan cityscapes, “Metropolitan” is about the least “parodic” or “postmodern” film I know.
Completely different ethos. Stillman’s films seem to me very much products of the late ‘70s and ’80s, Baumbach’s film very much a product of the ’90s.
Question: if you reversed the order in which you’d seen them, would Stillman’s films seem waaay too Baumbach?
To say what Matt said in a different way, Kicking and Screaming is more about Gen-Xers, whereas Stillman’s films feature boomers in the 70s and 80s. Furthermore, Stillman’s humor is different (and unique).
The more apt comparison for me is Richard Linklater, especially something like Slacker. Both films did a great job of depicting Gen-Xers, imo.
I find Baumbach’s work to be considerably less interesting than Stillman’s. Stillman’s characters are principled, passionate, humorously overeducated; I think Stillman sees much more of the big picture – and has a better attitude about it. Baumbach’s characters are cynical, listless, sarcastic (often downright mean), and most definitely _un_humorously overeducated (see Eisenberg’s painful dialogue citing “minor Fitzgerald” in Squid/Whale).
actually it’s ‘minor Dickens’? and in that case he’s aping his father whose pretension and self-regard are part of the point.
in any case, i love kicking and screaming w/ reckless abandon. Baumbach (much like Wes Anderson) made an amazing debut feature that he’s been unable to match, getting further and further w/ each sucessive film
@Brian P:
“Minor Dickens” is mentioned by Jeff Daniels – I claimed that Eisenberg mentions “minor Fitzgerald,” which is what he says, because he’s talking about This Side of Paradise. Yes, pretension and self-regard are thoroughly utilized Baumbach tropes.
-Kicking and Screaming is more about Gen-Xers, whereas Stillman’s films feature boomers in the 70s and 80s.-
Yes, and one might also point out that Stillman comes from upper-class WASPy types, while Baumbauch comes from Brooklyn bohemian types, so to some extent one’s reaction to their respective works may be a matter of one’s own cultural affinities.
Jasper Bleu
I enjoyed kicking and screaming but I couldnt help but to not respect it for it’s originality because it was waaaay too much like a Whit Stillman film even down to the actors. Does anybody else see this?