Reality Bites

Ben Stiller, USA, 1994
2.5 out of 4 stars

Winona Ryder stars, generally exhibiting her desirableness and her lack of talent. Ethan Hawke is her co-star, playing the scuzzy asshole who gets the girl even though I sometimes wished he didn’t, and concurrently found it very probable that he did. Director and secondary love interest Ben Stiller is the most interesting case though, as he plays a viable if hapless foil to Hawke in perhaps the only human performance I’ve ever seen him deliver (as opposed to his current career, which consists entirely of encouraging the audience to enjoy bad things happening to him). This is particularly fascinating because within the overall film, Stiller the director uses his own character more as a symbol of a lifestyle and ideology than as an important participant in the plot.

Actually, the long stretches of the film in which Stiller disappears seem to enable the two-headed nature of the film, as it lunges between the romance plot and the career plot. While these wouldn’t seem to be particularly contradictory, the film uses his presence or absence to dismiss one plot, almost out of hand, in order to focus on the other, which leads to a resolution that actually seems to ignore what the movie was about… well, at least half of the time.

All that said, Reality Bites is an interesting time capsule of a film, if wildly uneven, and it does contain some genuinely great character moments. My favorite of these is Stiller’s speech about Yorick, the only time when the film doesn’t try to convince us that Hawke has one-upped him.

Source: Universal anniversary DVD
24 September, 7:21 PM