Someone once said that if you had an infinite number of monkeys in a room (really big, and certainly no carpeting) typing at an infinite number of typewriters, eventually you would get the complete works of Shakespeare. I have long doubted the feasibility of such an experiment, but the movie Reality Bites has proven to me that not only is this experiment currently in progress, but that some of the products created en route to Hamlet and the Tempest have been made into movies.
Reality Bites is one of those movies, and is an abject failure. I went to see it not out of self loathing, as the evidence would seem to suggest, but rather because it was so blatantly targeted at my demographic: young white people, fresh out of college. I figured that when a movie is so specifically targeted at one group, that movie should provide an interesting mirror as to what my generation is all about.
Boy, was I wrong, and I paid for my mistake with an hour and a half of unpleasant writhing in a theater seat that I wouldn't wish on Josef Stalin. Reality Bites did not even begin to provide any sort of meaningful commentary -- just a clumsily recycled story line and a new vocabulary of clichés with which to fill in the spaces.
The basic plot of Reality Bites is also the basic plot of its predecessor by a decade, Valley Girl, almost any John Hughes movie, and innumerable other bad youthful romances: girl, good boy, bad boy, friends. Girl friends with bad boy, but bad boy pisses her off sometimes. Friends say girl like bad boy. Some friends warn girl about bad boy. Girl meets/is with good boy. Good boy is good, but we're supposed to see bad boy is better in some vague way. Girl eventually drops good boy and ends up with bad boy, happy. The end.
In addition to this ground-breaking plot, the subtexts of finding a job in our modern times, artistic integrity, and our generational mindset are thrown in, forming the flimsy framework upon which an amazing library of current clichés are hung. For example, everyone in the movie wears funky, thriftshoppy clothing and collects kitschy paraphernalia from the 70s. They also like to use nouns as verbs, such as saying "couch" for "sitting around." Take these details away, and this movie loses any relationship whatsoever to the generation it is trying so hard to explore. The Graduate, made well before any of this movie's cast or target were conceived, hits home far more accurately than the watery gruel served up in Reality Bites.
Such a standard plot needn't be the death of a movie, provided that you at least have interesting characters. Sadly, Reality Bites doesn't even come close. The characters are crude caricatures, leaving one to wonder why director Stiller chose not to make them wear shirts saying "disillusioned genius," or "yuppie," and leaving one feeling as though one were watching a movie version of an editorial cartoon.
A good example of the shallow, ham-fisted approach to characterization is in the bad boy played by Ethan Hawke. Hawke had the look down, with his thrift store shirt and scraggly goatee, but the character pretty much ends there. Hawke plays the disillusioned genius philosophy major, not willing to play the shallow game of modern life. Despite this rather clear role, the only method the writers of this movie use to demonstrate Hawke's genius is to have other characters just come out and say it, or, in some cases, have Hawke say it himself. Hawke covers the philosophy side by staring intensely a lot and once answering a phone by saying, "Hello, welcome to the winter of our discontent." To top it all off, he is in a band and, while a tough intellectual who doesn't play by society's rules, when his band performs the Violent Femmes' song "Add It Up," he can't bring himself to sing the lyric "why can't I get just one fuck," and instead substitutes that taboo word with a moan that sounds somewhat like Chewbacca, but without his depth.
Winona Ryder plays the main character, an aspiring filmmaker who also gets fed up with the system and is making a documentary about her generation. The scenes from her documentary differ from simple home movies in that, instead of people standing around a barbecue grill and waving inanely, her subjects are standing in differing locations and, in lieu of waving like morons, speak like morons. Her documentary is pointless and boring. The movie she is in is pointless and boring. After the movie, I felt pointless and bored. I would rather have been shoeless and snoring.
Actually, the fault of the film really cannot be put on the actors. They did the best they could with what they had, which was a task akin to trying to scare a Green Beret with a sock puppet. The real blame should fall on the writer. The writer is supposedly only twentysomething herself, a fact which I can believe in that the inexperience may be some justification for the tired pap that is Reality Bites.
Reality Bites is an entirely unremarkable movie, and in no way should be postured as any sort of manifesto for our times. It has no new insight to offer, the characters are noodle-thin and irritating, the soundtrack is forgettable, and it is entirely devoid of any cool robots or chase and crash scenes. A tragic waste of the human spirit.