The belated review of Older Children
I saw this movie almost exactly a month ago, but didn't really have a chance to sit down and do a review until, well, now. So here we go.
Older Children is a low-budget, very indie movie filmed in Chicago using the Chicago-based cast. Which, in on itself, is usually enough to get me to see the movie. I like seeing Chicago on film. And I've been watching indie movies long enough to understand that low-budget indie movies can be just as cliched, lazily plotted and badly acted as mainstream blockbuster movies. The fact that cliches are slightly different doesn't really change that. So I didn't go in expecting a masterpiece, even as I was hoping for the best.
What I got... wasn't what I expected at all.
Here is what Older Children is supposed to be about, according to the official synopsis:
Older Children is a portrait of underachieving twenty‐somethings; they’ve got plenty of questions and very few answers. Privileged, over-educated, and indecisive, they all stumble slowly -‐ and not so surely -‐ towards adulthood.
Which sounds like a perfectly decent plot. A slow plot, but a lot of indies have that. But it's not what we actually get. We get... scenes. A girl talking to her therapist. That same girl half-arsedly flirting with her subletter. A guy talking to his ex-girlfriend after sex. A guy working at a bookstore. Two girls talking while riding the 'L' train. A bunch of people sitting at a party and complaining. And so on and so forth.
And here is the thing - they are perfectly good scenes. Good acting, great character interaction, good dialogue, great location choices. It's just that none of them ever really go anywhere or add up to anything. It felt like I kept stumping onto set-ups for short stories, only to be pulled away before something would happen. The closest thing we have to something actually happening is the potential romance between Andy (Melissa Engle) and her subletter, but even that cuts away before it has a chance to go anywhere.
Not every movie needs to have a plot. Not every movie needs to have the characters change or grow. But there needs to be some kind of arc, some movement from Point A to Point B. Chungking Express wasn't just about Faye Wong dancing around in her crush's apartment. Autumn Moon didn't just have 20-something guy screwing women who reminded him of his first love. Y Tu Mama Tambien wasn't just two guys and an older woman riding around Mexico. Things happened. Things moved. They even changed.
But in Older Children, there is no movement from Point A to Point B. There's not even a Point B. Just a bunch of Point A's floating together until the credits roll.
This movie was funded, in large part, through Kickstarter. As I finished watching the film, I couldn't help but wonder how they felt.
"Is that it? Is that the movie we paid for?"
At the screening I attended, the director said that Older Children was intended as a critique of privileged, post-graduate mid-20-somethings who meander through their lives and don't really try to change or improve anything. Which sounds nice... but that's not a conclusion one would naturally draw from watching the film. The movie doesn't really give enough to draw any conclusions from. And if the plotless nature of the movie was intended to get us annoyed with the heroes of the movie and people like them, then mission accomplished - though I doubt that's really what they were going for.
Like I said - the scenes are great. They would work great as webisode previews for a movie or a TV show. But on their own... they are not really worth the price of admission, and they are not really worth your money, or time.
Older Children is a low-budget, very indie movie filmed in Chicago using the Chicago-based cast. Which, in on itself, is usually enough to get me to see the movie. I like seeing Chicago on film. And I've been watching indie movies long enough to understand that low-budget indie movies can be just as cliched, lazily plotted and badly acted as mainstream blockbuster movies. The fact that cliches are slightly different doesn't really change that. So I didn't go in expecting a masterpiece, even as I was hoping for the best.
What I got... wasn't what I expected at all.
Here is what Older Children is supposed to be about, according to the official synopsis:
Older Children is a portrait of underachieving twenty‐somethings; they’ve got plenty of questions and very few answers. Privileged, over-educated, and indecisive, they all stumble slowly -‐ and not so surely -‐ towards adulthood.
Which sounds like a perfectly decent plot. A slow plot, but a lot of indies have that. But it's not what we actually get. We get... scenes. A girl talking to her therapist. That same girl half-arsedly flirting with her subletter. A guy talking to his ex-girlfriend after sex. A guy working at a bookstore. Two girls talking while riding the 'L' train. A bunch of people sitting at a party and complaining. And so on and so forth.
And here is the thing - they are perfectly good scenes. Good acting, great character interaction, good dialogue, great location choices. It's just that none of them ever really go anywhere or add up to anything. It felt like I kept stumping onto set-ups for short stories, only to be pulled away before something would happen. The closest thing we have to something actually happening is the potential romance between Andy (Melissa Engle) and her subletter, but even that cuts away before it has a chance to go anywhere.
Not every movie needs to have a plot. Not every movie needs to have the characters change or grow. But there needs to be some kind of arc, some movement from Point A to Point B. Chungking Express wasn't just about Faye Wong dancing around in her crush's apartment. Autumn Moon didn't just have 20-something guy screwing women who reminded him of his first love. Y Tu Mama Tambien wasn't just two guys and an older woman riding around Mexico. Things happened. Things moved. They even changed.
But in Older Children, there is no movement from Point A to Point B. There's not even a Point B. Just a bunch of Point A's floating together until the credits roll.
This movie was funded, in large part, through Kickstarter. As I finished watching the film, I couldn't help but wonder how they felt.
"Is that it? Is that the movie we paid for?"
At the screening I attended, the director said that Older Children was intended as a critique of privileged, post-graduate mid-20-somethings who meander through their lives and don't really try to change or improve anything. Which sounds nice... but that's not a conclusion one would naturally draw from watching the film. The movie doesn't really give enough to draw any conclusions from. And if the plotless nature of the movie was intended to get us annoyed with the heroes of the movie and people like them, then mission accomplished - though I doubt that's really what they were going for.
Like I said - the scenes are great. They would work great as webisode previews for a movie or a TV show. But on their own... they are not really worth the price of admission, and they are not really worth your money, or time.