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American Teen (Film)
Rating: M
Running Time: 102
Country: USA
Distributor: Paramount
Film Worth: $9.50
Release Date: November 20, 2008
“…slick to a fault.”
Made with a lustrous panache, American Teen takes us to Anywhere USA, following a disparate group of soon-to-be high school graduates as they contemplate the real world, bad skin, social alienation and other heady ingredients in the classic teen angst cocktail. The result is certainly a smooth-drinking concoction that plants you in your chair, its multi-strand plot ticking over with apparent effortlessness. What American Teen isn't, in the truest sense of the word, is a documentary. With an uncomfortable affinity to MTV docudramas like The Hills, American Teen is slick to a fault. Despite the all-access coverage granted to filmmaker Nanette Burstein, the camera is in the eye of the dramatic storm so often that it strains credulity, and the soft-focus sit-down interviews show close-up ready youngsters totally unlike the zitty adolescents glimpsed in the candid footage.
While those who believe in the expansion of the traditional documentary aesthetic will not object to the ultra-modern and wow-worthy post-production patina laid on this film, the perfected compositions and opening bout of scripted voice-over will strike many as retrograde rather than groundbreaking. Scoring a perfect ten on style, this glossy doco makes an entertaining fist of taking us through a segregated social culture, and the uniquely intense pressures facing Generation Y.
A legitimate quibble is that director Nanette Burstein is happy to cast her young subjects as out-and-out stereotypes, bald-facedly labeling them The Geek, The Jock, etc. While such easy identifications will help to net a wide audience, scepticism should reign when these social stigmas aren't punctured, but rather extended through the film.
Despite its genuinely seductive veneer, American Teen doesn't have anything to say about the adolescent condition that American Graffiti didn't already cover off in 1973.