CHASING AMY
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Miramax) Starring: Ben Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams, Jason Lee, Dwight Ewell, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith. Screenplay: Kevin Smith. Producer: Scott Mosier. Director: Kevin Smith. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 110 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
The honeymoon is a short one for young American film-makers, a distressing fact of life Kevin Smith had to learn the hard way. In 1994, Smith was the wunderkind behind CLERKS, a low-budget, day-in-the-life twentysomething comedy which became a critical darling. Only a year later, Smith made a studio-financed follow-up called MALLRATS, a film so widely reviled that Smith publicly apologized for it, announcing "I don't know what I was thinking." Smith was thinking much more clearly when he returned to a sub-seven figure budget for CHASING AMY, but more significantly, he was thinking more maturely. Though he sometimes explores his themes with more earnestness than clarity, Smith gives CHASING AMY both a wicked sense of humor and a genuine sensitivity about the complications of sexual politics.
Smith's trademark pair of Jersey-bred buddies are Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck) and Banky Edwards (Jason Lee), childhood friends who have co-created a popular alternative comic book called "Bluntman and Chronic." At a comic book convention, Holden meets a fellow artist named Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams), with whom he is instantly smitten. There is a small impediment to his adoration, however: Alyssa happens to be a lesbian. Holden's love appears destined to be unrequited -- a fact about which Banky actually seems to be pleased -- until his relationship with Alyssa begins to take some unpredictable turns. As Holden struggles to deal with all the complications of being with a woman like Alyssa, cracks begin to develop in his relationships with both Alyssa and Banky.
For the first half-hour of CHASING AMY, Kevin Smith concentrates on churning out the laughs with his often-crude, usually pop-culture-heavy dialogue. He shows an admirable willingness to take on potentially thorny topics like gay stereotypes -- there's a great sequence involving a gay black comic book writer (Dwight Ewell) who is forced to keep up a public image as a militant Afro-centrist -- and a conversation about Archie and Jughead as gay lovers works despite its forced Tarantino-as-a-slacker quality. Smith even pulls off a riff on Jaws in which Banky and Alyssa compare wounds from oral sex horror stories like an emotionally immature Richard Dreyfuss and a lesbian Robert Shaw (though the flashback literalization of those stories is ill-advised). While the jokes are rarely profound, they are usually effective and delivered with zing by the actors.
Smith _does_ try to get profound as he focuses on the relationship between Holden and Alyssa, and it is there that CHASING AMY gets clumsy. When there is a point to be made in CHASING AMY, it generally gets made by people making speeches -- Holden as he confesses his love to Alyssa, Alyssa as she responds to Holden's jealousy about her past, even Smith himself in his recurring role as taciturn layabout-cum-philosopher Silent Bob (the film's title comes from Silent Bob's story about an ill-fated romance). Smith is still a writer first and a director second, and CHASING AMY gets awfully sluggish as he lets conversations drag into exchanges of soul-baring testimonials. It doesn't help that two of the longer speeches are delivered by Joey Lauren Adams, a talented actress but one whose Jennifer Tilly voice becomes grating when emotional scenes force her to wail for several minutes at a time. Smith clearly wants to stretch himself beyond satiric comedy, but he never quite finds a pace which gives the more serious moments in CHASING AMY a spark to match their sincerity.
It's a shame Smith's romantic observations never quite click as drama, because his ideas are far more intriguing than most of what is served up in contemporary romantic comedies. CHASING AMY is really about male sexual hang-ups, and Smith digs deep into the insecurities of his characters to find out why guys dwell on the sexual histories of their partners. There is an impressive lack of judgmental posturing in the way Smith develops his characters, and he shows keen insight into how different people respond to societal norms about sexual behavior. It's simply clear that Smith is still a guy who writes like people sitting around talking, and that style works much better with comedy than with drama. When it is at its funniest, CHASING AMY reminds you why everyone was so high on Kevin Smith in the wake of CLERKS. And even when it falters as a drama, it proves that Smith isn't content with making CLERKS over and over. Or, perhaps more important, that he won't make MALLRATS over and over. Anyone for a second honeymoon?
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 AMY abilities: 7.
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