Kicking and Screaming

Noah Baumbach's first film, made when he was twenty-six. Four friends have just graduated and none of them has left the campus. They are not looking for work, not moving, sitting in the same bar discussing the same subjects. One keeps postponing a graduate application, one does not know what to do now that his girlfriend has gone to Prague, one still works in the university library. The whole material is dialogue: fast, sardonic, constantly interrupting, never stating anything directly. The voice that becomes familiar in Baumbach's later films is already assembled here. The best passages are about indecision: the characters are not stalled because they do not know what they want but because they are afraid of having to say it. Josh Hamilton, Olivia d'Abo and Chris Eigeman star. It failed at the box office and came over the years to be counted among the defining American independents of the 1990s. The right place to start for anyone who likes films built on talk, and for Baumbach. For a viewer wanting incident, genuinely nothing happens, and the characters' privilege is never examined.