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If you're either gay or a hippie, or if you're someone who resents the idea of seeing either of those two groups of people ridiculed on film, you'd do well to stay away from True Adolescents. Come to think of it, the only people who may have potential to enjoy this movie are those who think they may be entertained by 90 minutes of homophobic jokes and 5 minutes of a hippie couple portrayed as cartoonishly as possible. If the movie I'm presently reviewing were one of those dozens of teenage slapstick comedies that get dumped into mainstream multiplexes, this wouldn't be surprising to anyone. Jokes of that variety are to be expected in that kind of film. But the fact that the film I'm referring to here is meant to be a serious independent drama is highly dispiriting. The title's intention is to describe the characters who populate the film, but it's hard not to get the feeling that it describes the writer-director as well.
Sam (Mark Duplass) is a 34-year-old failed musician. Because he's been kicked out of his house by his ex-girlfriend and makes no money, he seeks shelter in his aunt's house. She has two teenaged sons, Oliver (Bret Loehr) and Jake (Carr Thompson). Since Sam has never done anything to pay his aunt back for all the times she's helped him out, she forces him to take the two teenagers on a camping trip.
It all has the potential to be a terrific coming of age tale. Unfortunately, it's nothing but an elongated gay joke. I'm not kidding: for nearly the entirety of the film, these people are calling each other fags. I'd imagine even people who find that funny will grow weary of it after a while. In my case, it was pretty insufferable. Of course, those behind the film will argue that the reason why the three characters spend the film speaking to each other that way is that they're immature, but that the journey they experience leads them to change. I'd be willing to accept that, if the film's final act at least did a somewhat decent job at offering redemption to its characters and portraying how they actually grow into something else, but that's far from the case. What we actually get in True Adolescents is a total cop-out. The film's final act needed to focus on conversations that showed what these characters had learned and why they learned it, but instead, it uses the easy plot device of having one of the three characters get physically lost. The other two struggle to find him for a couple of minutes, and once they find him.... Ta-da! They've all come of age! To make matters more offensive, the film features one of those annoying sequences in which, as soon as the missing party is found, the main character makes a run to embrace him. The music that's attached to this sequence is also particularly dreadful. In the midst of all this, there's a brief appearance by a couple of hippies, and my gosh, does the film try hard to portray these two as one-dimensionally as possible. The film is so painfully obvious in portraying these two as blissfully ignorant that the portrayal never even comes close to hitting a note of honesty.
If there's one positive thing to be said about the film, it's that the performances are good. The problem is that all that does is make me even more disappointed, because it means that, had the film had SOME clue about how to portray characters evolving emotionally, it may have been at least a decent indie effort. It's particularly sad that Mark Duplass went from starring in terrific films like The Puffy Chair and Humpday to doing this. He acts every bit as naturally here as he did in those other two films, but his character in True Adolescents is twenty times less interesting. Also unfortunately, the magnificent Melissa Leo has way too little screen time, but as usual, she does everything right in the few minutes she gets on screen.
If there's something I hate, it's when films cheat or take an easy way out. True Adolescents is guilty of both of those things. For most of its running time, it has characters who call each other "gay" and all its offensive synonyms, and we're fooled into believing that this is all because the film is just portraying characters who have maturity issues. But once we realize that the film doesn't ultimately have any emotional intelligence to show for itself, it becomes obvious that those gay jokes were actually all that the screenwriter was ever able to come up with. The fact that the film uses an event as dumb as the momentary disappearance of one of its protagonists in order to get all of its characters to suddenly become better people is absolutely ridiculous and incredibly simple-minded. It's an insulting way of avoiding the complexity that needs to be present during the final act of a film like this, in order for it to work. I'm a supporter of this type of film, and you'll find evidence of that in the fact that my year-end top 10 lists generally contain at least one dialogue-driven indie drama, but I'm not a supporter of shallowness on the part of a filmmaker, regardless of whether the offender is Michael Bay or some 22-year-old recent film school graduate working on a shoestring budget.
4/10
