Jonah Hill (2018)
The running time in minutes isn’t even mid-90s – it’s only 85 – but those minutes don’t pass quickly in Jonah Hill’s directing debut. (He also wrote the screenplay.) In 1990s Los Angeles, a thirteen-year-old boy called Stevie (Sunny Suljic), who lives with his single-parent mother Dabney (Katherine Waterston) and his elder brother Ian (Lucas Hedges), gets involved with a group of daredevil, anti-social skateboarders in the locality. Most are kids several years his senior. I didn’t understand why Stevie had no friends his own age or why he was easily admitted to the set-up – unless to reinforce a sense of hierarchy and thereby the self-esteem of the older boys. The group already includes one younger kid, Ruben (Gio Galicia), who is jealous when Stevie appears on the scene. I wasn’t clear either whether the events were taking place in the course of summer holidays or if Stevie and Reuben were skiving off school.
The other members of the group – Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin), Fuckshit (Olan Prenatt) and Ray (Na-Kel Smith) – seem to be slackers and are certainly stoners. Hanging out with them means for Stevie accelerated rites of passage into drugs, drink and girls. Hill handles the cast well but his illustrations of young male insecurities and camaraderie are reliably unsurprising and the dialogue is boring. Long stretches of improv-ish like-what-the-fuck-man talk are interspersed with occasional ‘meaningful’ monologues, as when Ian, in a break from arguing with or hitting his little brother, tells him that their mother too used to be a crazy rebel or when Ray describes to Stevie the death of his younger brother in a road accident.
Sunny Suljic, who played the unfortunate son in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, is well cast as the melancholy but resilient hero: small of stature yet somehow old beyond his years, Suljic is an unusual screen presence. Even though the above-mentioned monologues stick out as attempts to inject depth into proceedings, they’re delivered very well by Lucas Hedges and Na-Kel Smith. He’s largely wasted but Hedges makes you want to know the fitness-obsessed, sadly isolated Ian better than the script allows. The fast cutting (by Nick Houy), the kinetic camerawork (by Christopher Blauvelt) and the score (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) are all of a piece but it’s a generic school-of-hard-knocks-coming-of-age piece. In the closing scene, Fourth Grade shows Stevie and the others a video he’s made and edited of what they’ve got up to together. It too is called ‘Mid90s’ and it lasts a couple of entertaining minutes. Its brevity has the effect of confirming that the movie containing it is mostly surplus to requirements.
15 April 2019
