Movies about teenagers often struggle mightily
to depict teenage life with any authenticity. It usually goes something like
this: There’s a pimple-free 30-year-old playing the star quarterback here and
canned, made-up slang that sounds a little like it might come out of a
teenager’s mouth there. It doesn’t feel real, or worse, it feels like the
writers and directors of these films had lived these lives, only too
long ago for it to ring true on the screen.
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| Photo credit: Blame/IMDb |
That’s not a problem in Blame, the
directorial debut of Quinn Shephard, who also co-wrote the script and stars as
Abigail, a high schooler whose shaky mental health does her no favors when she
accepts the female lead in her school’s staged reading of Arthur Miller’s The
Crucible. She can’t keep herself from developing strong feelings for the
substitute teacher (Chris Messina) who shares the play’s scenes with her. His
own inappropriate thoughts about her make everything worse.
Shephard was 20 years old at the time of Blame’s
production, but she looks even younger with the hesitant way she carries her
lanky limbs and averts her glum eyes from her classmates. Her youth means that
she doesn’t have to grasp at half-remembered straws to paint a picture of what
high school life is like in this era because she actually walked those
cinderblock-lined halls in the very recent past. Her memory is sharp and her
ear for how kids actually talk to each other has not grown tinny. Nor has her
grasp on how a teen’s hormones can make them feel like the fate of the world
rests on every interaction. Slights—no matter how minor—from other moody kids
and the adults who supervise them can feel like all of human history has been
shaken to its core.
These enormous emotional swings wouldn’t have
any impact without cinematographer Aaron Kovalchik’s impressionistic
camerawork. Car headlights diffuse through rain-soaked windshields to create
halo effects behind Abigail when she’s at her most vulnerable and hopeful. A
wordless cheerleading sequence repurposes classical musical dance sequence
framing—camera set at medium distance with the dancers perfectly centered—for a
modern, more inward-looking story. Its slow motion and moody music wouldn’t
exactly get Debbie Reynolds and Gene Kelly moving, but for a story about teens
battling various kinds of abuse, it hits the mark. Hitting on these filmmaking
fundamentals allows for occasionally affecting melodrama where the outsized
emotions make sense and feel real.
That Authenticity Comes at a Price
Having a sharp sense of what high school is
actually like cuts both ways in Blame. Those strong memories are so
closely tied to emotions, which are impossible to properly contextualize
without the benefit of age. The movie is unable to shake its characters’
perception of, “This is the most important moment of my life,” that hangs over
a teenager’s every waking moment. It makes sense for scenes about inappropriate
sexual feelings shared by an adult (who states that he knows better) and a
minor, but the emotions run out of gas when the same weight is placed on
woefully inept hookups and petty jealousies perpetuated by the movie’s young
side characters. This pedal-to-the-metal approach to every young person drama
comes very close to exhausting itself—no wonder why high schoolers need to
sleep until noon.
But at least the teens act mostly like you’d
expect a kid wracked with hormones to act. When the adults are on screen
without any of the teens, their behavior is borderline alien.
Shephard’s script, written from a story she developed
with her mother, Laurie Shephard, stumbles with adult characters when they
interact with each other. Messina’s teacher character and his adult problems
never feel as lived in as those of Abigail’s or her teenage rivals’. He
disappoints his adult girlfriend with his eagerness to embrace his temporary
teaching position—she has “a great job” waiting for him if only he’d find time
to meet with her associate. The details are so hazy, ill-defined, and
emotionally undercooked that it begins to feel like a child telling a story
about a conversation she overheard through an upstairs vent—and only
half-understood from the tone of the adults’ voices. It simply doesn’t feel
right, and it’s due entirely to a lack of life experience.
But if Shephard continues to ask extremely
complex questions about morality, as she does here, she will be well prepared
when she catches up on life experience. The sexual politics of this
movie—especially its climax—are brimming with ideas about paradoxical emotions
and motivations, misplaced anger, what the meaning of abuse is if the abused is
seemingly consenting, and doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Antagonist Melissa (Nadia Alexander), a cheerleader who also has a thing for
Hot Topic-style hair and makeup, could easily be drawn as a one-note piece of
garbage out to hurt the emotionally frail Abigail. But Melissa is no villain,
even if she’s a pain. She is revealed to have plenty of reasons for her
actions, and she even twists herself into doing a morally correct (and
cathartic) thing, even if it starts as little more than spite.
Blame is a utilitarian film through and through, where a moral end
overcomes (most of) the means taken to get there. It’s an uncomfortable sit for
reasons wholly unrelated to its heaviest thematic concerns, for it is a movie
that struggles against itself in a tug-of-war between its age-appropriate
authenticity and an emotional perspective that is simply impossible for its
creator to have. But Shephard’s is a voice that’s on the right track, one that
will sharpen with experience.
Director: Quinn Shephard
Writers: Quinn Shephard, Laurie Shephard
Starring: Quinn Shephard, Trieste Kelly Dunn,
Chris Messina, Nadia Alexander, Tate Donovan
Available in limited release and on demand now
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