American Teen
Movie details
Hannah, Megan, Colin and Jake: four 17-year-olds from a small town in Indiana who allowed Burstein and her crew intimate access to their last year of high school. We follow their passions, parental pressures, first loves, jealousies, drinking binges and more. You could consider each teen to be a classroom classic: Hannah is the arty outsider; Megan, the over-achieving rich girl; Colin, the sports man; and, Jake, the acne-strewn no-hoper - but you'd be wrong. Burstein's success is to look beyond these stereotypes and capture each teen's struggle to find their own identity.
Director Nanette Burstein
Stars Hannah Bailey, Colin Clemens, Geoff Haase
Themes and coarse language
Our review
Following a class of small-town American teenagers through their final year of high school, the documentary, "American Teen", focuses on a small group of individuals who each fit quite neatly into US high-school-movie character cliches. There's Hannah the artsy outcast, Colin the sports star, Jake the nerd and Megan the bitchy social queen.
While these easily recognisable roles are a convenient way for lazy viewers (and filmmakers) to establish where everybody fits, they also mean that a lot of potentially interesting issues are glossed over to keep each "character" firmly in their niche.
The most glaring example of this superficiality is in the way the movie deals with the realisation that Hannah has inherited manic depression from her mother. The issue gets a brief animated sequence that looks like it may have been cut out of "The Corpse Bride" and is not mentioned again - despite the fact that the girl couldn't bring herself to attend school for three weeks straight.
It's this steadfast refusal to dig into the stories, which really define these young people, that is most disappointing about "American Teen". Every time the movie gives a hint that there may be more than one dimension to any of its subjects, it almost aggressively re-establishes the flat stereotypes that they've been chosen to represent.
"American Teen" feels more like a spin-off of MTV reality shows, such as "The Hills" or "The Real World", than it does a documentary, and ultimately this undermines its authenticity. A remarkably high number of shots seem too perfect to have been spontaneous, and there are many conversations that feel as if they wouldn't have happened if a director wasn't there, prompting the kids to say certain things.
Because of this, it's difficult to really believe anything that "American Teen" presents; it all ends up tainted by the scenes that seem like re-shoots of the actual events or conversations.
5/10
Morgan Derera
In compiling yourTime content, HWW relies upon information supplied by a number of sources. yourTime content is supplied on the basis that while HWW believes that all the information in it will be correct at time of publishing, it does not warrant its accuracy or completeness.
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