American Teen

Stuck between childhood and adulthood, the teenage years are a confusing and tumultuous time. On the one hand, teenagers are expected to (and, to a certain extent, want to) make increasingly important and responsible decisions. On the other, there’s still the need and desire to enjoy life without any major responsibilities while one still can. It’s a time where wants and needs pull at each other and answers to once simple questions take on more layers.

Nanette Burstein’s documentary American Teen aims to tell the story of what it’s like to be a teenager in America today and remind the previous generation that the themes of growing up are similar to what they were when they were growing up in the 1980s. However, life for today’s teens is also a lot more complicated than Burstein makes it to be also. She opts to frame the focal teenagers similarly to the labels from John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. There’s Megan Krizmanich – the Molly Ringwald popular girl, Colin Clemens – the Emilio Estevez jock, Geoff Haase – the Anthony Michael Hall nerd, Hannah Bailey – the Ally Sheedy oddball and Mitch Reinholt, who doesn’t really fit one of the molds, rather he’s a bit of all four.

The film does itself a disservice by framing to these labels. It causes the story to stick to the surface ideas that have been told over and over again about teens in films rather than getting to the deeper issues. We see glimpses of them in passing, such as Hannah’s fear of school following a breakup, Megan’s pressure to get accepted to Notre Dame like her father and siblings and Geoff’s lack of self esteem. Little snippets for these and other deep issues are touched upon but never explored past either a mention or just one scene.

While demographics experts and marketing executives might say they have them figured out, it’s impossible to nail what it’s like to be a “typical teenager” in America. Every one is individual with individual circumstances. I don’t think anyone would deny this, including Burstein. However, the film sticks to the types of stories that have been told before. Perhaps it’s an issue of too many characters in which a limited running time prevents the type of depth required to do the teens justice.

Burstein did a good job of selecting interesting students. She is also very honest in portraying them. So honest, that more than once I questioned whether or not certain scenes were staged or recreated for the sake of drama. For example, at one point the camera’s there as Megan vandalizes a home. The camera is also directly on a cell phone as a very personal message is via text message. So either Burstein was able to gain the ultimate trust of her subjects or there was some recreations. Whichever it is, admittedly it adds to the drama and that’s not all bad. It’s just dangerous when it’s a documentary and that even if things aren’t being blatantly staged, just the fact that I was questioning the possibility put a distance between myself and the film. I couldn’t fully trust what I was watching, even on the level of knowing every film requires decisions on what to include and take out, thus making “the truth” an impossibility.

Ultimately, American Teen presents itself as getting inside the lives of America’s current youth culture. But the very idea of individuality is lost because it doesn’t go deep enough into the lives of its subjects to fully convey the idea. Yes, the subjects are interesting. Yes, the exist outside the labels they impose on each other and themselves. But what’s shown are a lot of the surface ideas that have been explored before. While Burstein touches on going deeper, she rarely does, which is unfortunate because there was so much more story to be told.

American Teen DVD Review

American Teen comes to DVD with a solid mix of features that add a bit to the film’s depth. The movie is shown in an enhanced widescreen format with Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround audio in English and dubbed Spanish. There’s also subtitles in the two languages plus French.

As far as bonus features go, “Pop Quiz” has the cast members answering questions about the filming process and life after the documentary was made. It lasts just four minutes. There’s six deleted scenes. Normally, deleted scenes are the bits that simply don’t work. Here, it’s more a case of them not fitting in. Some of these scenes are excellent but they’re just too long or they don’t fit into the overall story the film creates. There’s also ten video blogs with Hannah and chracter trailers that spotlight each of the main subjects in the movie.