The Myth of the American Sleepover: Indie Angst

My childhood friend & writing partner Tyler mentioned The Myth of the American Sleepover to me a few weeks ago as a film we should see together.  Along with being the type of movie we each individually tend to enjoy, Sleepover shares a lot of similarities with our current screenplay – the ensemble cast, the coming-of-age thematic narrative – and we hoped the successes and shortcomings of the film could provide us some insight into our own work.  While I would recommend Myth of the American Sleepover to anyone who similarly gravitates toward this type of angsty indie – it is arguably one of the best of its kind to be released in recent memory – the film will prove particularly valuable as a lesson for screenwriters in the art of the “antagonist-less” ensemble piece.

The feature debut of writer/director David Robert Mitchell, Sleepover ambles across the individual journeys of various adolescents as they navigate through a web of love, lust, and longing during a long summer’s night in Suburbia, Michigan.  The storylines of the four central protagonists – Maggie, Rob, Claudia, and Scott, all roughly 15 years old except for the 20(ish)-year-old Scott – do not directly relate to each other in any significant way, but Mitchell offers a sense of cohesion within the film through his thoroughly constructed narrative universe.  Despite featuring an incredibly large cast of characters, Mitchell’s demonstrates a truly impressive comprehension of the world in which they exist through the various ways he allows their stories to intersect, successfully immersing the viewer within the characters’ world without any moments of convolution or fragmentation.

As any screenwriter knows, providing a convincing and compelling narrative universe is an invaluable component of any successful film, especially ensemble pieces.  But whereas a more plot-driven film like Crash can rely on (in my opinion) contrived points of intersection between characters that unite them within a broader narrative, the minimalist style of Sleepover demands this sense of solidarity between characters to arise in a much more subtle and organically constructed manner.  While the suburban hometown provides an obvious source of connection between all the film’s characters, Mitchell clearly took ample time to draw out a map of these characters’ lives before writing a single page of his script, and the incredible extent to which his efforts show through in the final product should be dually noted by all writers, especially those who aspire to write similar stories.

Beyond being one of the film’s foremost accomplishments, Mitchell’s dexterously constructed fictional universe is particularly noteworthy in that it also in many ways serves as the story’s central antagonist.  More accurately, although minor antagonists exist within certain subplots – Janelle, who hooked up with Claudia’s boyfriend; the guy Maggie likes but turns out to be a creeper – the true antagonist of the film is the world in which the film takes place: the world of adolescence.

The tone with which Mitchell portrays this adolescent universe thus proves monumentally important.  While every plotline directly speaks to the type of romantic angst that so acutely defined much of our youth, the outcome of each narrative progression ultimately proves far less significant than the specific moments of potency that arise within them.  When Rob watches from afar as a captivating young blonde picks out a bottle of shampoo to purchase and waits for her to walk out of sight before longingly smelling her chosen brand; when Rob’s friend stops himself before divulging a seemingly significant revelation and shortly thereafter turns down the opportunity to hook up with an attractive young girl, vaguely suggesting a closeted conflict of sexuality that is never again addressed; when Maggie shares a cigarette with a cute older boy to prove she’s mature enough for him to take an interest in; when Claudia and Janelle’s boyfriend sit alone in the basement, and we sense his guilty yearning as the shallow focus of the camera drifts across the features of her face, landing on the two piercings in her left earlobe:  they all bleed together into an understated poem on the profundity in the mundane.

The poetically minimalist quality that drives the narrative proves to be a double-edged sword of sorts.  Mitchell pours himself into ever frame of the film, and the authenticity and sincerity of his authorial voice motivate every brushstroke in this painting of the adolescent exploration of identity.  But like any painting, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and voice of the individual characters ultimately yield to the prevailing voice of the auteur himself.

Every screenplay is a balancing act between the voices of the writer and the characters (s)he creates.  When writing stories like Sleepover that demand such a unique authorial tone, the writer’s own voice clearly provides an invaluable role in creating a compelling narrative world.  At a certain point, however, all the characters exist solely as extensions of their creator, and their own sense of unique and authentic individuality becomes diluted in the process.  The Myth of the American Sleepover undoubtedly succeeds with what it sets out to accomplish, and does it brilliantly at that, but creating particularly memorable and distinguishable characters never really seemed to be part of that goal – they act mainly as vessels through which Mitchell is able to express himself.  Films like these are a dying breed in modern cinema, and Sleepover will certainly prove a refreshingly memorable experience.  Many will maintain a strong affection for the film as a whole, which drips with nostalgia at every corner, but it won’t be Maggie or Rob or Claudia or Scott or any of the other characters that we find ourselves talking about for weeks to come; because at the end of the day, they’re all really the same person anyway: they’re us.