FILM: "Clerks II" (Kevin Smith, 2006)
I was absolutely gutted with Clerks II, the oft-threatened and long-awaited follow-up to Kevin Smith’s 1993 slacker classic. It’s less of a sequel than a revisitation of the characters and themes of the first film – a drop-in of sorts. Ten years after the original movie’s inconclusive end, nothing much has changed: Dante and Randall are still idling away their days at the Quick Stop, the former agonising over his wasted potential and plotting an imminent relocation to Florida while his errant buddy innocently goes about sabotaging Dante’s love-life. However, when the store burns down, the pair are forced to relocate to the equally hellish dead-end of Mooby’s fast-food chain. This, coupled with Dante’s burgeoning relationship with his feisty boss (Rosario Dawson), throws the fretting malcontent into yet another existential crisis; meanwhile, a quietly resentful Randall decides to throw Dante a going-away party which may just bring everything into focus.
Despite having apparently closed the book on his self-contained ‘View Askewniverse’ at the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, initial notices were very positive for Clerks II. The film garnered ecstatic reviews from the press, received a standing-ovation at Cannes, and the internet abounded with tales of everyone involved rating it as the best film Smith had ever made (though I suspect the laugh-a-minute shoot was perhaps inversely influenced by the crew’s difficult experiences making Jersey Girl). I was fairly surprised then to find the film a rather depressing affair – for the most part it’s tedious, unfocused and amateurish even by Smith’s own lackadaisical standards. The gags are forced, the dialogue scrappy and the exposition stilted. Perhaps this will now be his final flirtation with the Askewniverse in which he’s most at home - I have no doubt from the numerous times he’s returned to the characters of Clerks in both comic-book and animated form that Smith clearly feels he has unfinished business at the Quick Stop. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was perhaps one backward step too far: casting aside the ropey Dogma (which I’m still not all that keen on even after several sittings), Clerks II was the first time I’ve ever felt truly disappointed by something Smith has put his name to.
Some context first. Back in the mid-90s, two films completely changed the way I looked at cinema. The first was Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993): here I was seeing for the first time a film in which absolutely nothing happened. When the credits roll, Linklater’s characters are none the wiser: no conclusions can be drawn about their future, and little has changed. The film was ostensibly little more than a bunch of people sat around talking, and simply offered a snapshot of a moment in time. For someone raised on the likes of Romancing the Stone and Turner and Hooch, this absolutely blew my mind. I’d never seen anything like it.
The second was Kevin Smith’s much-maligned sophomore effort, the riotous live-action comic-strip Mallrats (which, despite what anyone says, is a fucking great movie – sharply written, snazzily performed and funny as hell). Here was Linklater’s stratagem raised to a different level: not only were the characters sat around talking, they were discussing things that were relevant to me. At that time I knew absolutely nothing about Kevin Smith, but I was able to deduce everything I needed about the man simply from digesting his work. Here was a guy who was speaking my language: both this and Clerks marked the first time I realised I had the ability to pursue an avenue that had, until that point, always seemed closed off to me.
David Gordon Green, the talented but rather po-faced director of George Washington, famously once derided Smith for having turned film-making into a kind of Special Olympics. The bearded slacker admitted to being amused but slightly bothered by this statement, and not without good reason - while there’s certainly no denying Smith’s rudimentary grasp of cinematic technique (which he has repeatedly admitted extends little further than pointing the camera at his characters and letting them do the rest), I would argue that his contribution is equally valid: rather than destroying the art of independent film-making, in actual fact Clerks liberated the form. Smith’s emergence on the back of such a knowingly amateurish effort may have unwittingly opened the floodgates to any number of third-rate photocopies, but then the same argument could be made of Star Wars – and while George Lucas’s retreat into a purely technological mode of storytelling certainly has a lot to answer for, his films revolutionised the industry by creating an entirely new platform with limitless potential. Those who simply imitate inevitably fall flat; those who take the ball and run with it instil the medium with astonishing new capabilities.
While such an analogy perhaps falls flat when applied to Kevin Smith (who never sought to create anything other than his own niche in the world), the fact remains that he is good. Smith’s writing, while often self-indulgent, is sharp, finely-tuned and perceptive; the performances he elicits from actors serve his scripts brilliantly and imbue the work with a unique sense of camaraderie that translates warmly to an audience. Clerks aside, he may never have quite cultivated the appropriate filmic vocabulary to best articulate the tone of his output (Dogma in particular is a decent piece of writing brought shakily to the screen), but his films are always watchable, if only by virtue of being so incredibly good-natured. Indeed, his third movie, Chasing Amy (1997), remains not only his most complete and satisfying work, but the piece which proves definitively that the man has talent: here, one of the snappiest screenplays ever brought to the screen is brilliantly executed in an exemplary display of how to bring a low-rent aesthetic to authentic bearing on modest material.
For the record, I really liked Jersey Girl, Smith’s opinion-splitting 2004 effort in which he broke away from the View Askewniverse and tried to do something a little different (in this case, a tart family comedy). While the movie didn’t exactly represent a serious departure for Smith - his trademark badinage remained intact, as did his penchant for ensemble playing and pop-culture satire - the film did signal a clear development. For years he’d joked about turning into John Hughes upon becoming a father, but with Jersey Girl he managed to marry the smart, savvy Hughes of old (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) to the less-cloying elements of his later, more adult-oriented output (principally She’s Having a Baby, to which Jersey Girl is heavily indebted). It still wasn’t perfect by any means: the clash of styles was at times ill-fitting, and he never has quite mastered the art of montage for anything other than sentimental purposes. But the film was sweet, well-intentioned, and a very definite indication that there may be life beyond the rent-paying stoner humour for which Smith had by then become known.
Which is perhaps the key reason why Clerks II is such a crushing disappointment. The film’s final fifteen minutes (in which Dante and Randall are arrested and their repressed frustration with one another finally comes to a head) is outstanding, as is a touching earlier scene in which the pair momentarily escapes the humdrum of their day-to-day existence, only for Randall to mournfully admit that “Sometimes I get the feeling the world left us behind a long time ago”. However, for anyone who detected the streak of underlying melancholy in the first movie, these revelations are nothing new. Smith wants so desperately to be taken seriously as a film-maker, but for every moment of genuine insight we get another three of childish regression into frat-boy shock-antics; it’s like the director is stuck in the exact same situation as his characters, desperate to break free from the mould he’s created for himself but unable to give himself enough credit to abandon such a safe vantage-point (indeed, Chasing Amy provides a fairly penetrating insight into Smith’s own psyche when read as a commentary on the struggle between artistic aspiration and creative complacency). Whereas the trash-talk and corpse-fucking gags that gave the original Clerks such a distinctive sense of the author’s voice were admittedly cheap, at the time they at least seemed genuinely fresh; here they just sound like concessions to the dick-and-fart crowd he seems perpetually unwilling to abandon. He’s proved that he’s capable of so much more - why is he so stubbornly resisting his own development by kowtowing to an audience that’s all but holding him back?
The over-riding impression I got of Clerks II was that Smith had been honing the film’s third act for years and then sat down to bash out the preceding hour in a week, simply scribbling down the first things which came to mind. For the first 60 minutes, the writing is incredibly lazy: in addition to meandering conversations between Dante and his two ladies, we get throwaway chat about ass-to-mouth, an enlarged clitoris and – most eye-rolling of all – a desperately unfunny donkey-fucking scene. Ironically, it’s non-actor Jeff Anderson who gives the film’s strongest performance, bringing depth and pathos to the eternally hopeless Randall; by contrast, Smith’s wife Jennifer Schwalbach is awful as Dante’s cheerleader girlfriend, clearly struggling with the verbose dialogue and looking hopelessly out of place. Elsewhere, the director completely wastes a series of celebrity cameos (many of which serve little purpose other than to demonstrate how many famous mates he has), and there’s an impromptu musical number that’s never quite as fun as it ought to be. Most tragic of all, discounting an amusing Silence of the Lambs parody (clearly just a bit of business that Jason Mewes concocted in Kevin Smith’s living-room one day), even the antics of Jay and Silent Bob aren’t particularly funny this time around - it’s as if Smith exhausted all their comedic potential in their last outing and they’ve simply been bought back as a token gesture. Smith proved with Jersey Girl that he can handle essentially serious material without resorting to needless smut; the simple fact is that he’s better than this.
And yet… for all its flaws, I can’t get over that last quarter-of-an-hour. Randall’s heartfelt speech to Dante in the jail cell is as touching as anything Smith has ever written, made all the more impressive by the impassioned delivery of man-of-the-match Anderson (whose initial reluctance to commit to the project visibly dissipates in this scene as we see his own complicated relationship with the character begin to surface). Indeed, the film’s closing shot - in which the camera tracks backwards through the Quick Stop aisles to the sound of Soul Asylum’s Misery, gradually fading to monochrome before it settles on Smith’s mother reprising her milk-maid cameo - is near-perfect, offering a hugely satisfying denouement that very nearly redeems everything that went before it.
It’s in these few moments that we see Smith’s true colours emerging. He has spoken at great length about his spiritual connection to the Quick Stop and a burning desire to return to the place which formulated his professional and personal identity. To this end, Clerks II is a cathartic pilgrimage of sorts - whereas the first time around Quick Stop was a demon to be exorcised, thirteen years later it seems more like a place of sanctity: an affectionate emblem of a better time. As a fellow writer, I can understand this paradox completely. The first film I wrote back when I was seventeen was Thrifting, a heavily Smith-indebted portrait of five disillusioned skater kids wrestling with the trials of youth in the late-90s. Years later, I can’t seem to escape its spectre; as unhappy as I was during that period, I now look back on it with an aching sense of nostalgia. To this day, I still find myself dressing the way I did back then, reminiscing about the music and pining for a way of life which has since become obsolete. Just like Clerks before it, Thrifting was written as a desperate howl of ennui; however, when redrafting the screenplay recently I noticed that while the characters resent the situation they are in, there is an intuitive feeling that things will never be this good again.
Ultimately, Randall and Dante’s realisation of their calling in life is a direct extension of the author’s recognition of his own inner truths. In acknowledging this, Smith’s film finally becomes a touching paean to friendship, and an unspoken love-letter to his best buddy and partner-in-crime Scott Mosier (whose disillusionment following the tribulations of Jersey Girl very nearly led to him quitting the business). No wonder then that Smith rates Clerks II as his most personal film to date, since it proves conclusively the one realisation to ring true: that home is where the heart is.
Despite having apparently closed the book on his self-contained ‘View Askewniverse’ at the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, initial notices were very positive for Clerks II. The film garnered ecstatic reviews from the press, received a standing-ovation at Cannes, and the internet abounded with tales of everyone involved rating it as the best film Smith had ever made (though I suspect the laugh-a-minute shoot was perhaps inversely influenced by the crew’s difficult experiences making Jersey Girl). I was fairly surprised then to find the film a rather depressing affair – for the most part it’s tedious, unfocused and amateurish even by Smith’s own lackadaisical standards. The gags are forced, the dialogue scrappy and the exposition stilted. Perhaps this will now be his final flirtation with the Askewniverse in which he’s most at home - I have no doubt from the numerous times he’s returned to the characters of Clerks in both comic-book and animated form that Smith clearly feels he has unfinished business at the Quick Stop. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was perhaps one backward step too far: casting aside the ropey Dogma (which I’m still not all that keen on even after several sittings), Clerks II was the first time I’ve ever felt truly disappointed by something Smith has put his name to.
Some context first. Back in the mid-90s, two films completely changed the way I looked at cinema. The first was Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993): here I was seeing for the first time a film in which absolutely nothing happened. When the credits roll, Linklater’s characters are none the wiser: no conclusions can be drawn about their future, and little has changed. The film was ostensibly little more than a bunch of people sat around talking, and simply offered a snapshot of a moment in time. For someone raised on the likes of Romancing the Stone and Turner and Hooch, this absolutely blew my mind. I’d never seen anything like it.
The second was Kevin Smith’s much-maligned sophomore effort, the riotous live-action comic-strip Mallrats (which, despite what anyone says, is a fucking great movie – sharply written, snazzily performed and funny as hell). Here was Linklater’s stratagem raised to a different level: not only were the characters sat around talking, they were discussing things that were relevant to me. At that time I knew absolutely nothing about Kevin Smith, but I was able to deduce everything I needed about the man simply from digesting his work. Here was a guy who was speaking my language: both this and Clerks marked the first time I realised I had the ability to pursue an avenue that had, until that point, always seemed closed off to me.
David Gordon Green, the talented but rather po-faced director of George Washington, famously once derided Smith for having turned film-making into a kind of Special Olympics. The bearded slacker admitted to being amused but slightly bothered by this statement, and not without good reason - while there’s certainly no denying Smith’s rudimentary grasp of cinematic technique (which he has repeatedly admitted extends little further than pointing the camera at his characters and letting them do the rest), I would argue that his contribution is equally valid: rather than destroying the art of independent film-making, in actual fact Clerks liberated the form. Smith’s emergence on the back of such a knowingly amateurish effort may have unwittingly opened the floodgates to any number of third-rate photocopies, but then the same argument could be made of Star Wars – and while George Lucas’s retreat into a purely technological mode of storytelling certainly has a lot to answer for, his films revolutionised the industry by creating an entirely new platform with limitless potential. Those who simply imitate inevitably fall flat; those who take the ball and run with it instil the medium with astonishing new capabilities.
While such an analogy perhaps falls flat when applied to Kevin Smith (who never sought to create anything other than his own niche in the world), the fact remains that he is good. Smith’s writing, while often self-indulgent, is sharp, finely-tuned and perceptive; the performances he elicits from actors serve his scripts brilliantly and imbue the work with a unique sense of camaraderie that translates warmly to an audience. Clerks aside, he may never have quite cultivated the appropriate filmic vocabulary to best articulate the tone of his output (Dogma in particular is a decent piece of writing brought shakily to the screen), but his films are always watchable, if only by virtue of being so incredibly good-natured. Indeed, his third movie, Chasing Amy (1997), remains not only his most complete and satisfying work, but the piece which proves definitively that the man has talent: here, one of the snappiest screenplays ever brought to the screen is brilliantly executed in an exemplary display of how to bring a low-rent aesthetic to authentic bearing on modest material.
For the record, I really liked Jersey Girl, Smith’s opinion-splitting 2004 effort in which he broke away from the View Askewniverse and tried to do something a little different (in this case, a tart family comedy). While the movie didn’t exactly represent a serious departure for Smith - his trademark badinage remained intact, as did his penchant for ensemble playing and pop-culture satire - the film did signal a clear development. For years he’d joked about turning into John Hughes upon becoming a father, but with Jersey Girl he managed to marry the smart, savvy Hughes of old (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) to the less-cloying elements of his later, more adult-oriented output (principally She’s Having a Baby, to which Jersey Girl is heavily indebted). It still wasn’t perfect by any means: the clash of styles was at times ill-fitting, and he never has quite mastered the art of montage for anything other than sentimental purposes. But the film was sweet, well-intentioned, and a very definite indication that there may be life beyond the rent-paying stoner humour for which Smith had by then become known.
Which is perhaps the key reason why Clerks II is such a crushing disappointment. The film’s final fifteen minutes (in which Dante and Randall are arrested and their repressed frustration with one another finally comes to a head) is outstanding, as is a touching earlier scene in which the pair momentarily escapes the humdrum of their day-to-day existence, only for Randall to mournfully admit that “Sometimes I get the feeling the world left us behind a long time ago”. However, for anyone who detected the streak of underlying melancholy in the first movie, these revelations are nothing new. Smith wants so desperately to be taken seriously as a film-maker, but for every moment of genuine insight we get another three of childish regression into frat-boy shock-antics; it’s like the director is stuck in the exact same situation as his characters, desperate to break free from the mould he’s created for himself but unable to give himself enough credit to abandon such a safe vantage-point (indeed, Chasing Amy provides a fairly penetrating insight into Smith’s own psyche when read as a commentary on the struggle between artistic aspiration and creative complacency). Whereas the trash-talk and corpse-fucking gags that gave the original Clerks such a distinctive sense of the author’s voice were admittedly cheap, at the time they at least seemed genuinely fresh; here they just sound like concessions to the dick-and-fart crowd he seems perpetually unwilling to abandon. He’s proved that he’s capable of so much more - why is he so stubbornly resisting his own development by kowtowing to an audience that’s all but holding him back?
The over-riding impression I got of Clerks II was that Smith had been honing the film’s third act for years and then sat down to bash out the preceding hour in a week, simply scribbling down the first things which came to mind. For the first 60 minutes, the writing is incredibly lazy: in addition to meandering conversations between Dante and his two ladies, we get throwaway chat about ass-to-mouth, an enlarged clitoris and – most eye-rolling of all – a desperately unfunny donkey-fucking scene. Ironically, it’s non-actor Jeff Anderson who gives the film’s strongest performance, bringing depth and pathos to the eternally hopeless Randall; by contrast, Smith’s wife Jennifer Schwalbach is awful as Dante’s cheerleader girlfriend, clearly struggling with the verbose dialogue and looking hopelessly out of place. Elsewhere, the director completely wastes a series of celebrity cameos (many of which serve little purpose other than to demonstrate how many famous mates he has), and there’s an impromptu musical number that’s never quite as fun as it ought to be. Most tragic of all, discounting an amusing Silence of the Lambs parody (clearly just a bit of business that Jason Mewes concocted in Kevin Smith’s living-room one day), even the antics of Jay and Silent Bob aren’t particularly funny this time around - it’s as if Smith exhausted all their comedic potential in their last outing and they’ve simply been bought back as a token gesture. Smith proved with Jersey Girl that he can handle essentially serious material without resorting to needless smut; the simple fact is that he’s better than this.
And yet… for all its flaws, I can’t get over that last quarter-of-an-hour. Randall’s heartfelt speech to Dante in the jail cell is as touching as anything Smith has ever written, made all the more impressive by the impassioned delivery of man-of-the-match Anderson (whose initial reluctance to commit to the project visibly dissipates in this scene as we see his own complicated relationship with the character begin to surface). Indeed, the film’s closing shot - in which the camera tracks backwards through the Quick Stop aisles to the sound of Soul Asylum’s Misery, gradually fading to monochrome before it settles on Smith’s mother reprising her milk-maid cameo - is near-perfect, offering a hugely satisfying denouement that very nearly redeems everything that went before it.
It’s in these few moments that we see Smith’s true colours emerging. He has spoken at great length about his spiritual connection to the Quick Stop and a burning desire to return to the place which formulated his professional and personal identity. To this end, Clerks II is a cathartic pilgrimage of sorts - whereas the first time around Quick Stop was a demon to be exorcised, thirteen years later it seems more like a place of sanctity: an affectionate emblem of a better time. As a fellow writer, I can understand this paradox completely. The first film I wrote back when I was seventeen was Thrifting, a heavily Smith-indebted portrait of five disillusioned skater kids wrestling with the trials of youth in the late-90s. Years later, I can’t seem to escape its spectre; as unhappy as I was during that period, I now look back on it with an aching sense of nostalgia. To this day, I still find myself dressing the way I did back then, reminiscing about the music and pining for a way of life which has since become obsolete. Just like Clerks before it, Thrifting was written as a desperate howl of ennui; however, when redrafting the screenplay recently I noticed that while the characters resent the situation they are in, there is an intuitive feeling that things will never be this good again.
Ultimately, Randall and Dante’s realisation of their calling in life is a direct extension of the author’s recognition of his own inner truths. In acknowledging this, Smith’s film finally becomes a touching paean to friendship, and an unspoken love-letter to his best buddy and partner-in-crime Scott Mosier (whose disillusionment following the tribulations of Jersey Girl very nearly led to him quitting the business). No wonder then that Smith rates Clerks II as his most personal film to date, since it proves conclusively the one realisation to ring true: that home is where the heart is.
posted by Chris Carter at 1:36 AM
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