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When I sat down in for my initial viewing of the film, during its too brief first run in Portland, I was less than a year away from graduating college myself. That fact, coupled with my own romantic failings, and the myriad ways in which Grover, Otis, Max, and Skippy reminded me EXACTLY of myself and my small group of classmates/friends, made the film painfully uncomfortable to watch during some moments, and then seemingly cliché during others. It captured its time very well, but those are precisely the sorts of films that never age well, ironically because they lose the ability to seem timeless. But there were deeper currents to navigate and it is those melancholic waters to which I have returned on probably a dozen occasions since, making it one of the few films I have seen more than two handfuls of times.

Although Baumbach has shown no qualms about pinning his characters/specimens like butterflies to the wall in the emotionally up heaved landscapes of The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, and Greenberg, he also has an affection for the trope of a lovable band of insiders/outsiders who together operate as a not entirely dysfunctional unit, as evidenced in his collaborations with Wes Anderson, and, though it feels odd to type these words, in his solely credited screenplay for the upcoming Madagascar sequel, Europe’s Most Wanted. The men of Kicking and Screaming may act like jackasses on occasion, but none of them are irredeemable and Baumbach seems to regard them with equal measures affection, skepticism, and critique. A warm empathy is prevalent, as is the notion that all hope is not lost.

Kicking and Screaming is not a romantic comedy, at least, not entirely, but for the entangled couple at the heart of the story, whose romance we see on its last legs as the film opens, Baumbach lucked out with actors who possessed the same sort of ineffable je ne sais quoi that popped when Ethan Hawke meshed with Julie Delpy in that same year’s Before Sunrise. It’s not easy to encapsulate precisely what makes the chemistry of Josh Hamilton and Olivia D’Abo - who play Grover and Jane - elicit such rapturous praise. They have maybe 15-20 minutes of scenes together and nothing remotely physical takes place between them.

Baumbach shoots/presents five of their six shared scenes together as flashbacks, parsed out at regular intervals throughout the film’s 96 minute running time and sharing a stylistic refrain: each starts out as a black and white freeze-frame of Jane, which then haltingly, hesitatingly comes to life (reminding me of the single frame of motion in Chris Marker’s 1962 sci-fi romance La Jette) before switching to color and normal speed. Accompanied by Phil Marshall’s spare, melancholic but somehow catchy acoustic guitar score, these moments take the film outside of itself hinting at a more serious sense of loss to accompany what one of the main characters jokingly refers to as his “nostalgia for conversations I had yesterday.”

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