Mini-Review: "American Teen"

By Lindsay Eanet

Published March 1, 2008

Twenty-two years ago, John Hughes united five high school archetypes together in a detention room in fictitious Shermer, Ill. Upon seeing past stereotypes and generalizations, the characters were able to understand each other — the brain, the athlete, the basketcase, the princess and the criminal uniting to become "The Breakfast Club."

Filmmaker Nanette Burstein has gone and updated Hughes's classic with "American Teen," following four high school seniors — each representing a different clique — through their last year and doing so with the glitz and production value of a Hollywood film. The most profound monologues, often fantasies or anxieties that the teens face, are done in a variety of innovative and often funny (although occasionally distracting) animated sequences. When shy band geek Jake is describing his fantasy, his persona is inserted into a CGI video-game world a la "The Legend of Zelda," where he is the hero and gets the girl. The different animation styles also reflect the protagonists' personalities: Gap-commercial pastels fill the screen as popular princess Megan describes her idealized situation at Notre Dame, while a Tim Burton-esque horror sequence takes over when artsy Hannah describes her fear of ending up like her mother.

"American Teen" is an aesthetically interesting film, but its real beauty is in its characters. While the outcomes are predictable, Burstein gives her subjects complexity and soul — and watching these kids unravel at times is nerve-wracking. The film has a lot of empathy for its subjects, and the viewer likely will be compelled to feel the same. There are, of course, as in every teenage experience, a few tender and empathetic moments that are truly gold: Jake's speech about being a missing sock needing its mate is surprisingly poignant, and Hannah's performance of "Cherry Cherry" in which she catches the eye of amiable jock Mitch is, for lack of a better word, adorable.

Burstein's film is very good — it's a touching and empathetic film with glints of innovation, able to exceed expectations but not completely life-altering. The epiphanies her four protagonists reach are to be expected and are not anything new; they are the epiphanies that most teenagers face when coming of age. They sound familiar because they are the realizations we all came to at some point or another, and perhaps this is the profundity of Burstein's film in a nutshell. Regardless of our communities, our circumstances and our cliques, whether we look upon those formative years with sweet nostalgia, disgust, rage or indifference, it becomes clear that, in essence, we all went through the same shit.

Burstein's obstacles were to be expected, though, and are no fault of her own but rather of her predecessors. With the high school years already playing such an important role in film — be it fiction or documentary — it is incredibly difficult to create anything truly 100 percent innovative or life-shattering. And by the time someone would come across that grand visioning of those years, we'd all be far too sick of reliving them to watch.