The Hollywood line is that this has been a summer of adult movies. But Forrest Gump, Wolf and Clear and Present Danger are not primarily for adults -- that is, for grownups in search of films a bit more demanding than those in the standard coming-of-age, horror and thriller genres. Somebody has to wonder: Can there be other kinds of pictures? And if they exist, can they connect with a sufficient number of appreciative viewers?
The answers, right now, are yes and yes. American independent films -- pictures made on low budgets and released by smaller distributors -- are shouldering their way into the Top 20 chart of weekly box-office winners. How low is low-budget? Kevin Smith's Clerks, a wonderful day-in-the-life comedy set in a New Jersey convenience store, arrives next month. The total budget was $27,575. If Smith were given, say, the $100 million that True Lies is reputed to have cost, he could make 3,626 movies.
But forget the money. Almost by definition, independent films are acts of love, not commerce. They are informed by the moviemaker's passion to put a vision on screen, and the process usually takes torturous years. That may be one reason so many of these films seem on the sour side. When getting a picture made means hocking your car, borrowing on your inheritance and panhandling your friends, the art that results can look pretty desperate. All the new films discussed below, even the comedies, play like cries from the heart -- want ads from the abused and the absurd.
White male, early 20s, just wants to get through the day.
Dante (Brian O'Halloran) has the night shift at the Quick Stop convenience store in Leonardo, New Jersey. Bright, dour and put-upon, he wastes or redeems his time by fretting about life -- about everything but his place in it, which he accepts with a readiness that annoys his friend Randal (Jeff Anderson). Clerks is a nothing-much-happens -and-ain't-that-the-big-truth? movie that gets considerable mileage from a couple of white guys, and their friends and customers, sitting around talking.
The film looks no more expensive than it was; some of the acting (by local nonprofessionals) is spectacularly amateurish; the story is a series of anecdotes about hockey, shopping and loving the one you're with. But it's worth loitering in this shop. You never know what headline will show up on the cover of a tabloid (SPACE ALIEN REVEALED AS HEAD OF TIME WARNER -- REPORT STOCK INCREASE).
Yes, the film has its share of scabrous banter -- recombinant four-letter words galore -- but the conceit of Clerks is that foul-mouthed Jersey louts have elaborate vocabularies and pensive personalities. When Randal isn't shocking the frail with a list of porn-movie titles, he is offering such bartender wisdom to Dante as this: "That seems to be the leitmotiv of your life, ever backing down." Insults cascade into insights; obscenity snowballs into philosophy. Keeping the mind alert and the tongue sharp -- for the eloquent jerks in Clerks, that's more than a defense mechanism. It's a vocation.
White male, late teens, desires to be left alone, preferably in the bathroom.