This movie kind of snuck up on me as charmingly twee, a throwback to coming of age movies of last decade, when representation need not matter and you could write a movie about two white teenagers trying to scam their way through the summer while dating babes and doing shenanigans, and I was happy to dismiss it as a small arthouse bro movie (I see you, Lighthouse), until Wife asked me which movie I was seeing yesterday morning and when I said “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” she made a face and asked if I had read any reviews and then quoted to me, “There are no Black characters in this movie, only black people,” which led to the fastest change of ticketing I have done in a long while, because I have trust issues since that one Tom Hanks movie. Anyway, that was my journey to seeing this last night at 8PM.
I’d read a little bit about the casting, the way that Conor Sherry and Gabriel LaBelle, two talented guys in their twenties were cast as fourteen year old boys, which I think is just great. Their slightly older friend who is simultaneously in college and also the National Guard which has been deployed to Desert Storm is played by a very not-gay Nick Robinson from Love, Simon(!)! Gillian Vigman and David Costabile have a lovely, let’s say, five minutes as the rightfully paranoid parents of Conor Sherry’s Eagle (because, Scout), and Gabriel LaBelle’s dad is the gay chorus member from Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog! Small World! Mika Abdalla, who plays the eye candy of this movie, an almost textbook sexy lamp of ambiguous age (except, “older” than the boys), is the only person to really break the streak of completely whitewashed casting which is otherwise explained by “Nebraska” and “1990” and the shrug emoji, I guess. She’ll be amazing in a movie when she’s given lines instead of a one piece bathing suit and an insatiable thirst for fourteen year old boys with no strings attached.
I said at first that Nick Robinson’s sensitively drawn, emotive, worldly wise Shane is “very not-gay,” but actually I would be surprised if others haven’t written about the gay energy between him and Eagle. There are more than a few moments when they seem like they are gearing up for a kiss or at least an understanding that their trip to Alaska is about more than just slamming beers and erecting tents in bear country, which as I reread that sentence it is kind of the gayest thing I’ve written in a bit? But then it’s always clear that Shane is careful not to step on anyone’s toes, especially because he estimates rightly the strength of Goose’s bond with Eagle even as he is offering him chances to get out from under his “shot-calling”.
The dialogue in the first forty-five minutes of this movie has this manic, frantic energy to it that reminds me of every scene where two friends do coke for the first time together, the wide-eyed wildness, the electricity, and Snack Shack replicates a lot of that energy through the close up shots on the two friend’s faces as they go back and forth, punching each other’s throats and breathlessly scheming their next schemes in order to level up in this world. It helps that at no point do the boys seem like their shenanigans are meant to really cause harm in the world. All of their get rich quick schemes require a lot of careful planning and hard work, or gambling, and there’s always the fact that they are fourteen, and the high school and college boys that they encounter are almost uniformly jacked up on roids or hiding behind a bush to punch them in the kidneys.
The magic of this movie is in the novel locations for late night parties, their adventures in the first act, and the second act introduces some of the laziest love triangle writing one can imagine. The dialogue loses a lot of its steam an hour in, and the final act indulges in some maudlin killing off of characters which feels like someone ran out of magic, but maybe this is actually the perfect kind of moment? A death off screen? Unexpected? To wrap things up? No, it’s dumb.
