‘It’s all just a… a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes…’
The 90s was the decade of the slacker. Kevin Smith movies. Dazed and Confused. Indeed, Slacker itself. All these movies captured the zeitgeist of Generation X. Dripping in irony, clad in plaid and constantly smoking cigarettes, the characters in these movies are all branches from the same tree. Reality Bites – Ben Stiller’s directorial debut – is probably the most Generation X, slacker movie ever made. These characters are as cliche and as archetypal as any you will find in this genre. Everything just screams 90s grunge explosion. The grainy aesthetic, the loudQUIETloud soundtrack, the verbose but lazy characters. But in a way, there is a skill in collating all this stuff together. If there was to be a Generation X museum, Reality Bites would be playing in the lobby as you walked in, just before Randall from Clerks abused you from behind the counter and a Mudhoney song started playing from over the speakers…
Lelaina Pierce (Winona Ryder) is a fast talking, manic pixie dream girl who finds herself in the middle of a love triangle with Troy Dyer (Ethan Hawke), a budding musician and total, irredeemable piece of shit, and Michael Grates (Ben Stiller) a high flying MTV executive. And that’s it. That’s the movie.
First off, I really can’t overestimate how annoying Ethan Hawke’s character is in this movie. He’s pretentious, he’s not funny and he’s a bully. This tortured soul, bad boy character was all the rage in the 90s, but thankfully, the world has no time for their shit anymore. On the other end of the spectrum, Stiller’s character is also fairly annoying, but does at least try to be a nice guy. Stiller’s main flaw with Reality Bites is that he never makes it clear what outcome we are supposed to be rooting for here, because if we are supposed to be rooting for Lelaina and Troy to get together… that is absolutely not clear. Man, I hated that guy.
Despite all its failings and genre trappings, Reality Bites has a great script (penned by Helen Childress), a great soundtrack, and most of all, a truly great performance from Winona Ryder at the film’s heart. She really does carry this movie in a way that few actresses of her generation probably could. She is utterly convincing and somehow manages to at least make her character likeable (no mean feat considering that like Troy, she is also a pretentious, flighty arsehole).
Reality Bites is probably not a good movie, it’s certainly not as good as Cable Guy (Stiller’s directorial follow up to this film) but it is a useful time capsule into a unique, cultural maelstrom from which we all emerged as wise cracking, ultra self aware losers.
The 90s has a lot to answer for…