Movie Reviews

Paramount Vantage

Review in a Hurry: Documentarian Nanette Burstein trails five high school archetypes from small-town Indiana as they navigate the murky waters of senior year, with all the attendant pitfalls, foibles and tempests-in-teacups one might remember from their own confusing school daze.

The Bigger Picture: Whether you consider high school the best years of your life or are happy to have left them behind, director Burstein brings it all back. She spent the better part of 2005 chronicling the senior-year adventures and mishaps of five teens attending Community High School in Warsaw, Ind., and it's a revealing, if familiar, trip.

With a population of 12,000, the quintessentially Midwestern backdrop (and "orthopedic manufacturing capital of the world") offered up the usual assortment of high school stereotypes: Megan, the privileged, snooty daughter of a surgeon, hell-bent on enrolling in her father's alma mater, Notre Dame; Hannah, the kooky misfit who dreams of escape and film school in California; Colin, the pressured basketball star whose father happens to impersonate Elvis; Mitch, a Tiger Beat pinup waiting to happen; and Jake, who couldn't have been plucked from central casting to be a more deadpan, self-denigrating "loser."

True to life, the popular kids aren't quite as transparent as former freaks and geeks might remember, just as the lives of the misfits are more complex than the prom kings and queens might have imagined.

Burstein manages to gain her subjects' trust, unobtrusively capturing some awkward, private and painful moments (Hannah's breakups, Megan's infantile rages, Jake's foot-in-mouth episodes with girls). The stories are interspersed with fanciful animated sequences, which play out the teens' fears and fantasies. The gist of the film can be summed up by a pep talk to Jake from his out-of-town prom date, Leslie: "You'll accomplish amazing things. You'll get through high school."

The 180—a Second Opinion: High school life is displayed accurately, neither completely horrifying nor nostalgically idealized, but you might wonder what the stealthy director could've accomplished by pointing her cameras in the direction of a subject with a little more heft.