Hear me out: why More American Graffiti isn’t a bad movie
After Bill L Norton’s More American Graffiti hit theaters in August 1979, Janet Maslin called it “grotesquely misconceived” in the New York Times. The movie still holds a 20% score on Rotten Tomatoes and, since its release, has been largely forgotten. But just like 2008 Kentucky Derby racehorse Big Truck, More American Graffiti was thrown to the wolves under the guise of a pitiful, boring title and high expectations. At the box office, the future Oscar-winner Apocalypse Now and the audacious Life of Brian ran the gamut – so More American Graffiti had to be a near perfect sequel in order to outshine its competition sweeping the US. It wasn’t.
The movie’s predecessor, 1973’s American Graffiti, was a perfect film. A baby boomer’s chef d’oeuvre. An Oscarnominated encapsulation of suburban American idealism, positioned before the looming culture shift as the first troops touched down in Vietnam. It had the sitcom star Ron Howard and the future Oscar-winner Richard Dreyfuss. On the flipside, More American Graffiti was seen as a messy experiment – a movie not just decimated by Dreyfuss missing in the cast, but also by failing to nail the transition from the original’s late-night car cruises and doo-wop chart-toppers to a distinctive and differentiated riff on a decade-old counterculture.
Still, More American Graffiti does right in honoring the original by capitalizing on its narrative formula, in that it properly balances the lives of all of its protagonists – but this time not over the course of one summer night, but four consecutive New Year’s Eves.
Milner (Paul Le Mat) is competing in an amateur drag-racing league in 1964; Toad (Charles Martin Smith) fakes his death during the Vietnam war in 1965; Debbie Durham (Candy Clark) falls in love with a honky-tonk singer in 1966 after Toad was reported missing in action; conservative suburban couple Steve and Laurie Bolander (Howard and Cindy Williams) are raising twin boys while their marriage falls apart in 1967. Each year is shot differently, ranging from super 16mm used during the Vietnam war chapter to the multiangled split-screen shots reminiscent of the Woodstock concert film in the Haight-Ashbury scenes.
But to me, what defines More American Graffiti is the earnest attempt it makes at remembering. Like its predecessor, the film is eulogizing something. In American Graffiti, it was an era loved and longed for by the people who lived through it; in the sequel, it’s the memory of a now-deceased friend carried on by four people widely separated from one another, as if they are each living in four different worlds, or in four different films.
Where American Graffiti was immediately a breathing time capsule full of familiar faces that an entire generation could always return to, More American Graffiti was seen as unnecessary – released in the era before sequels became blockbuster endeavors. Movies like Jaws 2 and Beneath
the Planet of the Apes, were obvious studio cash-grabs recycling exhausted ideas but More American Graffiti is an experimental love-letter to teenage omnipotence becoming adult mortality – with the urgency of foreshadowed devastation at the center of it all. The viewer knows Milner dies at the end, but the quick mentions of the anniversary of his death, the way each character’s memory of him is still so clearly palpable, reminds us that, yes, these characters have grown apart from each other, but they are still tethered together by the grief filled with Milner’s absence.
That’s what makes More American Graffiti so compelling, that there is a beautiful melancholia lurking beneath the comedic surface. It’s an empathetic look at the distances in which our sorrows can migrate. Early in the movie,
Toad breaks the news to Milner about his upcoming deployment, to which Milner ironically retorts: “Just come back alive.” The story then ends 12 hours later, as the cast communally sings Auld Lang Syne at the break of midnight, while Milner drives his famous yellow Ford Coupe towards the car crash that will kill him. When his car disappears into the California landscape, the grief surrounding his death takes immediate shape in the collective suffering of what characters are still left to remember him.
More American Graffiti is available to rent digitally in the US and UK