The story follows four teenagers (well, three teenagers and a kid who's probably about 21 or so) as they drive, walk and bike around their pristine mid-'90s suburban town looking for very specific people to hook up or make friends with. The first is Maggie (Claire Sloma) who is a bit of an alterna-chick (with a few piercings on her face) going into her freshman year of high school (actually, she might be a rising sophomore... It's confusing which kids are in what year because they all do the same things). She lusts after a guy she sees at the public pool as well as another guy who cuts grass around town.
Then there's Rob (Marlon Morton), also a freshman, who sees some blond girl at the supermarket and spends the rest of the night searching for her at the two slumber parties and several other house parties there are. Then there's Claudia (the very fetching Amanda Bauer) who is new to the school, but somehow already hooked up with the high school stud guy (I guess it doesn't hurt that she's cute, blond and skinny... ah, high school). She's invited to one of the parties, not knowing her new beau and the hostess have a history.
Finally there's Scott (Brett Jacobsen), who is going to be a senior in college, but unsure of his direction (The Not-Yet-Graduate, I guess) and decides it would be a great idea to track down twin sisters he had a thing for (four years earlier) in high school who are that night at a freshman orientation "sleepover" at the University of Michigan.
Many of these stories crisscross, where one guy will go to a girls' sleepover to look for someone and then leave to go to another party where he'll bump into another one of the characters. This seems to be set in the 1990s, so they don't have fancy things like mobile phones, let alone Facebook or iPhones. There's actually an interesting sweetness to the analogue nature of the evening, where the kids actually have to meet and talk to people and go to find others if they want to... although, this is all possibly a bit precious and a bit too soon for such nostalgia.
I feel like Mitchell spends so much time setting up his suburbia uber alles that he ignores the fact that we still need to connect to these characters on levels beyond just that we might have had similar experiences in high school. I like that most of the kids are looking to just "hook up" or "kiss" others (and not have sex with them) because that's all you really want when you're 14 or 15. But those desires aren't very deep or very interesting. I feel like every character is just a bunch of nerves and a list of personality traits, but not really fully developed. When Claudia discovers the true story of her boyfriend's past, she move fast to avenge the past, but we never really see very far inside her, what her own history is with guys, what she's thinking about starting at a new school or how she found her boyfriend over the summer.
Scott is more a comic book kid than any naturalistic character. His trek from the suburbs to Ann Arbor to seek out the twin cuties feels rash and unrealistic. Its banal romanticism should have more motivation than it does, and we're left saying, "what the hell is he doing? This would never work." (There is a clever, if shallow, homage to Godard's Band of Outsiders running in an upper floor of UM's Angell Hall... Go Blue!)
This film is a first work and it does show some promise in small moments. There is some very clever, snappy dialogue ("menage a twins") and a few wonderful moments (such as the scene in slow-mo of the kids filing into their respective parties like ants as a song by Beirut plays on the sound track), but the film really only ever rises to a be a collection of short stories that are all a bit too emotionally simplistic and rely too much on our nostalgia for our own childhoods. Sentimentality has never really worked for me, and neither have the lily white suburbs.
Stars: 2 of 4
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