DVD Review: American Teen

You generally don't want to judge a film by its advertising campaign, as the creation of the film and the marketing of it are generally two separate entities. But in the case of the documentary American Teen, new to DVD as of December 23, you can't help but feel that how director Nanette Burstein put the film together was influenced by how it was to be marketed, to the detriment of the film. It's not that I dislike the advertising; I enjoyed the trailer when I first saw it, and the whole Breakfast Club motif is one of the reasons why this movie caught my eye.

The problem is that too much of the film feels shoehorned to fit the marketing plan rather than to properly service the footage and stories that have been captured. The film is clearly trying to position itself to get a portion of the Juno or Napoleon Dynamite audiences (a review quote comparing it to both of those films appears on the DVD cover), while borrowing The Breakfast Club's conceit of representing all of teendom through five archetypes: the rebel (Hannah Bailey), the jock (Colin Clemens), the prom queen (Megan Krizmanich), the heartthrob (Mitch Reinholt), and the geek (Jake Tusing), five high school students attending Warsaw Community High School in Warsaw, Indiana.

The attempt to shoehorn these kids into their Breakfast Club counterparts is problematic. (Judd Nelson wasn't a heartthrob... he was a criminal! Ally Sheedy was a basket case, not a rebel! C'mon!) Sure, the kids fit into different stereotypes and cliques that make up our memories of the high school experience, but by trying to mirror John Hughes' characters, the movie doesn't always follow the most interesting stories. Plus, because this is non-fiction, we often don't get satisfactory conclusions to the arcs they've chosen to highlight. You can feel the marketing pull in the case of Mitch in particular, who is presented as one of the five featured teens, but in reality was a supporting character introduced as part of Hannah's story, then pushed to the forefront when Burstein and/or the producers realized they needed a Judd Nelson (even though, as I just mentioned, he doesn't fit the Judd Nelson archetype at all).

Article Author: Andy Sayers

Andy Sayers is a technical writer from Canada, which automatically makes him funnier than people from other countries. When not writing about pop culture, he is consuming it alongside his loving wife.

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