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I'll have a Mooby burger, extra ennui to go, please. (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: Retains most of the charm of Clerks.
The Downside: Don't ask about the donkey. Please, don't ask.
The irony of Clerks II is that the early-90's indie crowd that made the first film a hit are mostly now parents who will be passing the sequel by while shepherding their kids into the next screening of Pirates of the Caribbean. It's hard to say whether or not this labor-of-love sequel to the 1994 breakout is superior or slumming, simply because both are definitive species of their very different times. You couldn't make a movie like Clerks today- sure, there would be plenty who would still admire the gumption writer/director Kevin Smith had to film a story about the we-don't-have-a-life and times of two twenty-year-old store clerks while he worked as a convenience store clerk himself, and it isn't as if his tendency for raw, sexually um- ambitious dialogue (remember what a "snowball" is?) has been tapered that much (it has been in comparison, but there's still plenty here to make your average PTA mom flee from the theater screaming). But Clerks wasn't just the natural by-product of Generation X arrested development that was so celebrated in Smith's inspiration, Richard Linklater's Slackers- it was born and bred of a decade when the term "independent film" developed a wide connotation of its own. It was the decade of Dazed and Confused. It was the decade of Pulp Fiction.
The times, they say, they are a change'n.
If you recall, Clerks worked like a filmed almost-one-set-play, depicting out-of-high-school and out-of-life clock watcher Dante Hicks (Brian O'Halloran) and his lascivious best bud Randal (Jeff Anderson) on a breezy Saturday at a derelict New Jersey convenience store. It was a static transmission- it had no plot, it was barely more than an excuse to have a couple of guys hurl insults at customers and debate the moral politics of Return of the Jedi. It featured its characters as a black hole. College drop-out Dante, the Able to Randal's I-hate-everyone Cain, was the one at least pretending to take his life seriously as he tried courting an old flame from high school. The 90's motif fit in because, by the end of the film, none of the characters changed. Dante was still clerking at the Quick Stop, Randal was still conducting his verbal jihads against the customers of the video shop next door. It was as it should be for fans of era zeitgeist, a never-ending cycle going round and round. If Smith had decided on a sequel a couple of years after Clerks, it's most trenchant tagline would have been "Same sh**, different day."
But it's not a couple of years- it's twelve years later and Clerks II is the definitive work of the man who made Clerks with a few more birthday candles, a little more sobriety and a lot more introspection. Yes, yes, it still plays like history's most foul-mouthed sit-com, but since most of the fans of Clerks now have mortgage payments, Smith has sprinkled in some direction and just a little bit of the touchy-feelies. It isn't the same bit of guerrilla moviemaking that got Smith noticed in the first place, now blessed with a heftier $5 million budget and, that's right, color (!), but that works for Clerks II as easily as it works against it. It's a more commercial brand of Smith, at least as commercial as a movie featuring a scene of "inter-species erotica" can get.
As I said, it's twelve years later and Dante, older, a little pudgier, and now engaged to a domineering sexpot (Jennifer Schwalbach), has fallen in stature (if such a thing was possible) and has become a fry jockey at Smith's favorite McDonald's in-joke, Mooby's, after a fire claimed the Quick Stop. Randal has made the jump with him where he spends most of his time, when not having sexually-explicit outbursts in front of the customers, harassing a Lord of the Rings-loving kid (Trevor Fehrman), giving Smith the chance to put LOTR and Star Wars into the ultimate verbal death match. The story plays much closer to convention than Smith is used to- Dante isn't sure if he's in love with his fiancée, but is attracted to the allure of the "normal" life a marriage would provide. At the same time he nurses some true lovin' feelings for the Mooby's very tolerant manager (especially seeing that Randal doesn't get kicked to the curb after an embarrassing racial epitaph shout-out), played in shades of understated grace by Rosario Dawson. It's a new time, so gone is the idea of slackerhood as the idyllic and celebrated state of the sub-Baby Boomer generations and in its place is Smith's conviction that even his layabout creations have to finally learn some moral lessons and become masters of their own destinies.
For most people, it will be a relief that the pesky and disposable "plot" doesn't feed off too much of the running time. Clerks II still works as a rendering board for Smith's gift for sight gags (he's the only person I've seen turn a Beanie Baby into an expletive joke) and quirky characterizations. That LOTR kid, also a devoted fan of The Transformers (shiver) is one of Smith's few new introductions, most other characters having passed through a long lineage of his other films. Back again are Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Smith himself), the two wall-leaning weed dealers who like to hang out wherever Dante and Randal are, either now embracing their new-found religion (!) or recreating the sadomasochistic dance sequence from Silence of the Lambs. But what stands out in just about every Smith film is his patented skill as a writer of dialogue that is as deeply meaningful as it is occasionally NC-17 inducing. That's the key to Smith's subversive genius- as raunchy as his movies can get (oh, is that the understatement of the decade), they're also free from mean-spiritedness and undeniably sweet. Since Clerks III: The Viagra Years is probably a long shot, here Smith finally builds a feel-good coda for Dante and Randal that plays like the final epilogue to Clerks- the meaning and turn-around we were supposed to get after the generational brooding. This isn't a put down- even when Kevin Smith decides to play nice and follow the rules (think Jersey Girl), he still does it ten times better than what you'd see on your average cineplex double date. What this means is that Clerks II is a lot like Clerks, this time with a get-on-with-your-life message tacked on.
But the golden question is: is Clerks II funny? The easiest way to answer that is to gauge your own reactions to the first. Clerks II isn't a radical departure; it still has a dependence on Smith's brand of bodily function humor, but it is also still smart, still inventive (gotta dig the Jackson 5 dance number!), just with a little more of a reflective, staid interpretation of a 1990's dance card. Slackers of the world unite- it's time to go out and face the real world. B
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