The Sixties Reinvented

I suppose if you wanted to pin down any single recent trend in American films, it would have to be romanticism, or more bluntly, escapism. Ragtime and Reds recall the times of horse-drawn fire engines and "high society', when reform and idealism weren't laughable pursuits, and you could fall in love without analyzing it first. The social messages of these movies have been dwarfed by their length, intricate period settings, and romances. Yet the only alternatives contain no message at all: norror, comedy, and adventure all start from the proposition "what if..."/ and ask that you leave the real world at the ticket booth. Arthur Penn has had trouble dealing with America's failure to face facts. His early films exalt the gangster, the loner who lives above and beyond society despite the tragic consequences. Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man, show compassion and humor while revealing the ugliness of American mythology. Yet 1976's Missourt Breaks shows confusion, and worse, a lack of anything to say.

Four Friends, his latest effort, seemed to promise facing our more recent past through less misty eyes than we've grown accustomed to. The sixties currently enjoy a romantic revival all their own. The music of Jimi Hendrix and the Doors may be even more popular now. Political activist reminisce bout those bolder days. And our first strong president in two decades only makes us miss the Kennedys more. But portraying social issues and confronting them are two different things, and no one in Four Friends seems to know what they're about. Four Friends is particularly disappointing since Penn also directed Alice's Restaurant, the dark farce widely acknowledged as one of the finest "sixties films."

"Why does everything take so long," wails Georgia, one of the four friends, near the film's end, and the audience feels the same way. Throughout, scenes malinger like the last couple to leave a cocktail party. You know what they're talking about, where they're headed, and the harder they try, the more they exhaust your interest. Penn forces the audience into active participation to keep track of characters and motivations, and consequently loses all control. Four Friends is the celluloid equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting, splashing everything about the sixties--sex, drugs, rock, JFK, the moon shot, draftcard burnings, racial tension, etc--into one amorphous mass, demanding more emotion and extracting more then it's worth. Penn and screen writer Steve (Breaking Away) Tesich drape images of America--idealistic immigrants, the national anthem, a flag-burning--with out ever evoking an emotion. The "action" drags so that you find yourself not only out guessing the "suspense," but imagining situations more compelling than those that actually transpire.

The friends--quickly pasted and cardboarded stereotypes--are simply four losers who keep ending up on each other's doorsteps like stray cats. Danelo (Craig Wasson). The son of Yugoslay immigrants toys with writing poetry and playing the clarinet; Tom (Jim Metzler) provides the he-man silent type, meaning he has only a half-dozen lines; David (Michael Huddleston) is the chubby, balding Jewish son of an undertaker who inherits the business; and Georgia (Jodi Thelen), a vivacious, lusty young debauchka who drives all three boys to be forever singing "Georgia in My Mind." Georgia is supposed to be dynamic--she has more personality than a pingpong bail has bounces--spewing endless tripe about her heroine Indoor Duncan, her first grey hair, her boundless love, and youth. Instead of responding to each other, the characters make embarrassing should-baring speeches. We care and know so little about them that they seem to be reading for a screen test for some other film.

Penn and Tesich stuff so many old so many old socks of social issues into this laundry bag of a movie that the odors overwhelm. They drag us through a predictable much of cliches--a drug trip, a terminally ill college roommate--losing fun and movement in the search for "meaning". All the classic themes, the signs of the times, proliferate but they all fall flat.

There seems to be a conflict between praising and damning America but it is all done with TV-movie style images. The race conflict only emerges in two confused, isolated noncommital instances, JFK is reduced to a poster on a wall and a picture on a beach ball; and going to Victnam apparently has no effect on Tom other than providing him with an Oriental wife.

Personalities and hairstyles change from year to year, but the net result is nil. Danclo lives through the entire decade clinging in his Slav roots, rooting a variation of The New World symphony on his recorder. Early on, his father calls him "a coward not a fighter". Penn wants you to feel Danelo has become a fighter, yet his moment of triumph involves kicking a local dopey cup in the groin and then throwing up on him. Instead of learning from his experiences, or gaining social awareness, Danclo remains basically the dimwit we met a long, long two hours ago, pursuing whatever brunette happen to be with him (we never see how he meets them) and retaining true love--for no earthly for the psycho nympho weren't those days crazy? Wild kids social upheaval?

Four Friends is the most deadly Mind of escapism, because it truly believes its vacant depiction of the sixties to be a profound all encompassing statement.

Four Friends is a retrospective lock right. It's an ass-backwards cavalcade of newsreel-type images lacking sound and fury, interspersed with gratuitous about ethnic groups, a kitchen sink toward detail, and a felling of amity that never gels.

Surely there was more to the sixties than that.