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AMERICAN TEEN
Directed by Nanette Burstein
Produced by Burstein, Jordan Roberts, Eli Gonda & Chris Huddleston
Released by Paramount Vantage
USA. 95 min. Rated PG-13

There’s something obsessively appealing about movies set in high school. Maybe it’s that teens are at the threshold of their lives, and everything seems huge and exciting—each love is a first love, every heartbreak is unforgettable, and big dreams loom large in the future. Maybe it’s also that high school is a hothouse, with people who will be able to avoid each other in adult life forced into the same stressful space every day, trapped in an inescapable, hormone-addled caste system.

Nanette Burstein, who co-directed The Kid Stays in the Picture, plays on the popular fascination with high school by making a real-life teen drama that has all of the best loved elements of fictional teen movies—first love, heartbreak, a geek getting drunk and wild for the first time, prom, and falling-outs between friends and parents who just don’t understand.

Burstein follows five small-town teens in Warsaw, Indiana, through their senior year. There’s Hannah, the beautiful outsider girl with the manic-depressive mom. She lives with her grandmother and wants to go to film school in San Francisco, à la Laney in She’s All That. Hannah has a loyal male best friend who’s always there for her, and puts on a pastel suit to take her to prom, shades of Ducky in Pretty in Pink. (Although he seems to be gay, the issue goes unmentioned.) She dates Mitch, the cute, popular jock, who struggles with peer pressure for going out with the arty Hannah.

Colin, the basketball star for whom an athletic scholarship is his only shot at college, buckles under pressure from his “old man,” like Andy in The Breakfast Club. Video game-loving band geek Jake is sort of like the boys in Weird Science, if they had no friends and never created a fantasy woman who came to life. We feel for him, but see how he’s his own enemy, like when he tells a girl who has agreed to go to a dance with him, “We have a lot in common—we both suck at life.” And rich, popular princess Megan, daughter of a local surgeon, rules the school with bullying and meanness (spray-painting “fag” on an enemy’s window). Like Claire from The Breakfast Club, she covers up her pain and anxiety.

The result is an addictive, juicy, classic high school drama that utterly sells itself. That the teens are heterosexual, white, and American-born goes unexamined. The darker, stranger social issues faced by today’s American adolescents—sexism, racism, homophobia, intense body image issues, drugs, and more perilous sexual norms—largely stay out of Burstein’s picture. She has chosen to make a gratifying film instead of an edgy one, and it’s hard to fault her for that decision.

I would happily watch a sequel or prequel to American Teen or a series of similar projects in different schools if Burstein made them. It’s less like the 2000 PBS series American High, which followed 14 Illinois students through a school year and got at all the heavy issues in a way that was educational (but a huge bummer), and more like a John Hughes film. In American High, the kid’s stories were left shaky and unfinished. In American Teen, each of the five stories has a relatively happy ending of the kind that teen movie buffs crave—the kids cross into the adult world, whole and ready to live. Elizabeth Bachner
July 25, 2008