Orange County

(Jake Kasdan, USA, 2002)

The teen movie genre in America has a very pleasant middle range. These films are neither gross-out extravaganzas nor dark-side parodies of the form, but charming comedies that mix a quietly inventive style with poignant sense of people's dreams and foibles. They are like superior episodes of teen television series, and indeed often involve television people from before and behind the camera angling for their big cinema break.

Orange County is the best film of this sort since Drive Me Crazy (1999). Director Jake Kasdan detoured into the television series Freaks and Geeks after his clever debut, Zero Effect (1998). Actor-writer Mike White also hails from this show. They have gathered a wonderful cast for this story of a budding writer, Shaun (Colin Hanks), dreaming of escaping his staid hometown and starting over as a student at Stanford.

Like the Australian film Love and Other Catastrophes (1996), Shaun fights the clock in order to get himself on Stanford's enrolment list after an administrative bungle. Some mildly outrageous humour is assured by the assisting presence of Lance (Jack Black), his drug-addled but kind-hearted brother.

This is the kind of movie in which almost no one is completely evil, brainless or emotionally withdrawn. Even Shaun's depressive mother, Cindy (Catherine O'Hara), and his money-obsessed father, Bud (John Lithgow), have salutary moments where they break stereotype and go to the end of themselves. The same goes for the ultimately noble figure of Shaun's girlfriend, Ashley (Schuyler Fisk).

Kasdan keeps scenes moving briskly with many nice touches, such as the use of ironic musical "stings" from rock and pop classics. Best of all, he avoids the easy options of either cynicism or idealisation when Shaun finally meets the literary hero who kicked off his quest, Marcus (Kevin Kline). Orange County is a modest but extremely satisfying film which restores some dignity to the industry cliché of the character-driven comedy.

© Adrian Martin August 2002