CINEMA-USA: School Reunions Are Hell

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jun 3 1997 (IPS) - According to Hollywood, meeting your old school friends can be one of the most traumatic – and rewarding – experiences of later life.

Two new comedies doing the rounds of cinemas in the United States explore this theme. ‘Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion’ and ‘Grosse Point Blank’ both come from divisions of the Disney entertainment conglomerate and, perhaps most strangely, both combine funny moments with a creeping sense that life at high school often is bleak and hostile.

If that sounds like a strange subject for comedy, the plot of ‘Grosse Point Blank’, produced by Disney’s Touchstone studios, likely falls outside some people’s defintion of fun: an assassin, Martin Blank (John Cusack), goes to his old school’s 10-year reunion to tie up loose ends.

The film, directed by George Armitage and co-written by Cusack, thus combines two hip genres: ‘Generation X’ movies – in which twenty- year-olds deal with growing up – and the recent burst of violent-but-ironic successors to Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’.

That genre-mixing works surprisingly well: ‘Grosse Point Blank’ actually succeeds at combining the sweet coming-of-age theme with the occasionally gruesome wit of Tarantino’s world. Few recent movie scenes have been as memorable as the one in which Blank discusses the worries of a hit man a psychiatrist (Alan Arkin) who openly fears him.

“Don’t shoot anyone for a while,” the psychiatrist counsels. “See what it feels like.”

The movie thrives on such moments of deadpan wit, which Cusack – who has been playing puzzled youths for more than a decade – delivers skillfully. “I can’t go home again,” he tells his psychiatrist when he finds his house has been turned into a grocery store. “But I can shop there.”

Strangely enough, the sunny world of teenage films wins out over the hip (but already dated) Tarantinoesque comedy-violence. Although Blank kills quite a few rival hit men over the course of the film — at one point, he even shoots out a ‘Pulp Fiction’ poster — the movie tries, if awkwardly, to settle into a romantic comedy about Blank’s efforts to regain his high school sweetheart (Minnie Driver).

‘Grosse Point Blank’ earned some criticism when it opened a month ago, with some critics accusing the film of amorally avoiding the consequences of identifying with a paid assassin. The movie does trade on some easy quips, as when Blank muses how to describe his job at the reunion: “I murdered the president of Paraguay with a fork.”

Yet the film ultimately has a traditional heart, well in keeping with Disney’s family values – Blank’s stunned expression, when he looks into the eyes of a newborn baby belonging to one of his former classmates.

‘Grosse Point Blank’ – the title refers to a Michigan suburb, one of the richest in the United States – is a more upbeat film that ‘Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,’ directed by David Mirkin. Although both films share music from the 1980s and deadpan humour, ‘Romy and Michele’ makes the task of going back to your past less one of regaining old friends, than of taking vengeance on former enemies.

Vengeance is really what motivates Romy (Mira Sorvino) and Michele (Lisa Kudrow) to return to their Arizona high school: They want to prove that they are now important in front of the popular high school girls who snubbed them. But after failing to win good jobs or boyfriends in the run-up to the reunion, they decide simply to lie and claim to be businesswomen and inventors.

Romy and Michele are a genuinely charming pair: Both drift through a world that neither one quite understands. When Romy says she has only eaten candy for an entire day, Michele sighs sincerely and responds, “I admire your discipline.” Kudrow is especially good playing someone so genuinely dazed by life that her whole face lights up when she gets ideas.

The problem is that, although Romy and Michele are as funny and bumbling a pair as Laurel and Hardy, the plot complications that surround them are often mean-spirited, depicting high school as a hellish world of tormentors and losers. In flashbacks, the two are mercilessly mocked by their peers; one chain-smoking friend (Janeane Garofolo) constantly curses at the pain of being unpopular in school.

All pretty thin stuff for a comedy. Predictably, the film’s high spirits fall flat over time, even though Romy and Michele of course prove indomitable, and perform a victorious ballet that is probably one of the longest and funniest dance numbers in a movie. But ‘Romy and Michele’, even more than ‘Grosse Point Blank’, begs the question: Since when did school become the focus for such unpleasantness?