Reality Bites (Review)

Although I never went to college or university, I did for a time live like I dropped out of one, with a small house shared with a rotating cast of flatmates. So while I don’t pretend to be just like the characters in Reality Bites I can understand at least the pressure of a low income, low expectation existence.

What I can’t understand is how I can’t like one single character in this damn film except the one guy who most characters resent. The guy that seems destined to lose.

In this small rented home Lelaina (Winona Ryder) is the semi successful one, with a steady job at a TV station as an assistant, Vicki (Janine Garafolo) also has a job, though at the less cool corporate clothing chain called The Gap. (If they made this film today Leilani would be a blogger and Vicki would work at Starbucks.)

Into their lives returns former classmate Troy (Ethan Hawke), an intellectual slacker – for mine the BEST kind of slacker – who lolls on the couch all day waiting for someone to walk past so he can ask them to fetch something from the fridge, before decrying their sellout existence in increasingly acerbic ways.

By the way, the film would have you believe that the cynical git on the papasan chair wasting his gift whilst spewing hate filled diatribes at those he calls friends is ‘the dreamy misunderstood one’.

I understand Troy all right. He’s a dick.

There is dialogue so dry and witty it should be used for kindling – actually the same could be said for the painfully thin Ryder – and Leilani and Troy share tension so palpable that it is almost unbearable. Actually I retract that statement. It genuinely is unbearable.

To make matters worse the guy with a job and inner drive who treats Leilani well is essentially the bad guy. Which seeing as he is played by Ben Stiller, who also wrote and directed, baffles me no end.

I mean it’s not even fair to compare this to Mo Money. At least there the incumbent boyfriend was an obvious tool.

This is a fairy tale for a crazy world. The doe eyed princess who can’t make decisions of her own starts out with the handsome prince, a man who cares for and about her. Yet she yearns for less. She wants the loathsome hate filled troll from under the bridge who continually asks his ‘questions three’ then giggles like an idiot when someone cannot answer them before denigrating their upbringing, education and inner work ethic.

Fuck the indecisive princess. Fuck the timid prince. And fuck most of all the hateful troll. Oh and despite the fact that it isn’t horrible; Fuck Reality Bites.

Final Rating – 6.5 / 10. Despite being one for a time I cannot understand the retrospective fawning lavished over slackers. Most boneheads I knew at the time were reasonably intelligent, but we just liked Xbox and karate movies more than work, and definitely more than we liked belittling others to make ourselves feel important.

All Reality Bites taught me is that Stay is a great pure pop song, and that even though I’ve probably done it (ok definitely done it) dancing maniacally in public is never a cool move.