For a certain set of twentysomething Americans, a majority of them male and at least slightly socially awkward, Kevin Smith's Clerks was a watershed moment. His 1994 micro-budget black-and-white indie sensation about two aimless losers who work at a convenience store and a video store, respectively, was vulgar, crude in both language and visuals and utterly refreshing; it offered inveterate geeks hope that they, too, might have two girls fighting over them, even though they spent the bulk of their day debating philosophical minutiae of the Star Wars trilogy.
Full disclosure: I am twentysomething, male and socially awkward, and I have seen Clerks too many times to admit without shame. I've also witnessed the sad decline of writer-director Kevin Smith, whose last film, the gloppy, unbearable Jersey Girl, was a disheartening low point for the once innovative and caustic director. Drenched in sentiment and as generic as any Hollywood assembly-line product, Jersey Girl killed any optimism I might have had for Smith's long-term career prospects, and I approached the new Clerks II with apprehension.
That's probably the best way for any long-time fan to come at the film, and if you go in simply expecting the movie to be better than Jersey Girl, you're not likely to be disappointed—but you won't be blown away, either.
Chatting With the Clerks |
Brian O'Halloran: I'm like, "Wow. Absolutely. I'm in. I'm there." I'm a working actor. If Kevin Smith wants to have me star in a movie, I'm like, "Absolutely." Jeff Anderson: I was a little less enthusiastic than Brian.
JA: Clerks wasn't screaming for a sequel. It's such an odd movie that I think a large part of the success is the backstory of the movie: the $28,000 budget, the black-and-white thing. And how do you go back and replicate that without screwing everything up? It's a nice thing to 12 years later still get fan mail. Nice people say nice things, and I didn't want to upset that.
JA: The way we left it was, he said, "Will you at least read the script if I write a script?" And I'm a fan of the characters, so I wanted to see what he had in mind. I really liked the script, but more than that I was in a weird position of being the only person that didn't want to do it. And I knew that if I didn't do it, it probably wouldn't have happened. I caved in to peer pressure.
JA: I'm really glad now, yeah. I really enjoyed the script. I just didn't know how he was going to do it. We couldn't be back in the stores doing the same thing, talking again. And it couldn't be that different. I thought he had his work cut out for him making a sequel that was going to be not too different and not too similar, and I think he did it nicely. BO: This fan base is rabid. For 12 years now, me and Jeff, we still get fan mail, we still get a really nice reception. We don't want to pooch that. We don't want to fuck it up by not only making this be a bad movie, but then tainting the love that they had for the first. |
The main problem is that Smith has simply run out of things to say. Like Richard Linklater's Before Sunset, which picked up nine years after his Before Sunrise with the characters having aged just that much, Clerks II finds main characters Dante (Brian O'Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) 12 years older and still working their dead-end jobs. But after a fire consumes the convenience store, they end up working together at Mooby's, a fictional fast food joint that's played a role in past Smith films.
While the original film seamlessly integrated its banter-filled sketches about the absurdities of life with the more poignant existential angst of its lead characters, the new installment isn't so successful. Randal and Dante still engage in many graphic, expletive-laden discussions of sex and Star Wars, and they're occasionally very funny, but after 12 years Smith is undeniably treading water. At least the jokes haven't lost their edge—far more distressing is how often Clerks II becomes nearly as sappy as Jersey Girl, thanks to its main plot thread, which finds Dante engaged to the shrill Emma (Jennifer Schwalbach, Smith's real-life wife and a terrible actress) but in love with his boss, the near-perfect Becky (Rosario Dawson).
In Clerks, Dante's romantic travails were believable if exaggerated; the women competing for his affections were both likeable and flawed. But since the creaky rom-com conventions of Jersey Girl, Smith's abandoned emotional nuance and instead crafted a love story about as realistic as your average Kate Hudson movie, and when that's not enough, he breaks out the tender bonding moments between Dante and Randal. Whereas once he was able to convey the deep bonds of their friendship via snappy dialogue, now he spells it out in heavy-handed, dopey speeches.
At least goofy stoners Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are still around to occasionally deflate the film's annoying self-importance. And any movie that features a portly man having sex with a donkey can't be accused of playing it safe. Although, really, donkey sex is exactly what Smith's fans have come to expect from him, and, after all this time, his biggest shortcoming is that he still can't think of anything better.