BOOMER FILM BUST GOES
Not Fade Away indulges in too much ’60s navel-gazing, and not enough freedom fighting
He’s young, intelligent, insecure and eager to make his mark on the world — all of which makes the hero of David Chase’s debut film, Not Fade Away, somewhat average. That’s not a bad thing in a movie attempting to capture a collective coming-of-age experience, but Douglas (John Magaro) feels a little too generic to make much of a dent in the used car lot of the American film tradition — no matter how earnest the writing or how likable the character. Introduced to us as the sympathetic outsider who watches his peers play rock ’n’ roll to a rapt audience of fellow teens, Douglas is a little nerdy and a little desperate. He would like to be one of the cool kids, but he’s self-aware enough to know he’s not going to ascend the peak of hip on looks or talent alone.
He’s got to carve out a niche and assert his own brand of manhood, a feat he attempts using unconventional means: He grows his hair, buys himself a drum kit and joins a band. Yes, it sounds cliché, but as Chase wants us to remember, it’s only cliché now.
At the dawn of the 1960s, boys growing out their hair and playing in rock bands was still a relatively revolutionary idea, and one that would certainly cause offence to any red-blooded American patriarch seeking the continuation of macho tradition. Hence, the tension in Douglas’s life: His old-fashioned father Pat (James Gandolfini) feels Douglas is nothing but a massive disappointment. “You look like you just got off the boat!” he yells, pointing to Douglas’s pea coat as immigrant attire. Meanwhile, Mom irons in her curlers and shrieks, “I’m gonna kill myself!”
Maybe every family back then reinterpreted the previous night’s episode of The Honeymooners at the kitchen table. And maybe all this movie really needed was a kooky neighbour to leaven the loaf with comic yeast, but Not Fade Away never seems to knock on the right door.
The movie is desperate to conjure a sense of nostalgia and we can sense it in every gorgeous recreation of the era, from the period Pep Boys cargo van to the silk lapelled suits and V-neck sweaters.
Chase wants us to ride the cresting wave of the counter-culture movement and feel the adrenalin rush of seeing the world from a different perspective, where drugs, sex and rock ’n’ roll redefined the landscape of the everyday.
Douglas is designed to be our touchstone on this crusade for personal freedom — at least the one every baby boomer supposedly fashioned from the shackles of 1950s repression and homogeneity — but for a variety of reasons, we never quite land on Doug’s doorstep.
For starters, he’s not the most charismatic fellow. Prone to whining and turning inward about his seemingly endless dilemmas, Douglas feels a little clammy and clingy. He finds endless fault in others without looking at his own many shortcomings.
He tries to weasel out of moral problems by doing nothing, and when the time comes for Douglas to really stand up and face the unsolvable problems that come with maturity — such as the demon of mortality — he squirms like a five-year old.
Central characters are supposed to transform and grow, but Douglas simply grows more self-involved, which suggests the most interesting statement Not Fade Away is making, if only accidentally: The freedom generation failed entirely.
If Douglas represents the average boomer who saw injustice, wrote the poems and bared its soul and body politic at Woodstock, the quest was doomed before it began because it was rooted in self-satisfaction.
The only thing that motivates Douglas in every scene is his own contentment.
He wants to hang with pretty girls, so he joins a band. He wants to be a famous lead singer, so he stabs his best friend in the back. He wants to write poetry and be an intellectual, so he dismisses his old-school father.
Douglas is a spiritual leech who justifies his selfish ways by seeing them as revolutionary acts against the status quo. In saying “I just gotta be me!” he’s reaffirming the idea that it’s all about “me,” which in turn disconnects him from everyone and everything around him.
One gets the feeling Chase was trying to offer a brand of Benjamin Braddock, the central character in Mike Nichols’s classic The Graduate. He even casts an actor with the same sad expressive eyes as a young Dustin Hoffman.
Ben was selfish, but the veneer of arrogance was stripped off by the maelstrom of love. He was capable of moving beyond himself, but we get the feeling Douglas never will. He will always be seeking his next satisfaction.
And guess what? He can’t get no satisfaction. Nor can we, because we never really enter that magical, sympathetic space that makes filmgoing so much fun.
Ironically, it’s Gandolfini who provides the only truly tender moments of humanity as the curmudgeonly, abusive father — which erases every scrap of heroism Douglas possessed.
A frustrating journey that feels pale and pat in all the wrong places, Not Fade Away is a blanched tribute to a generation still looking to sign its name with a Sharpie.