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Daydream Nation
Still courtesy of TIFF.
Daydream Nation
Certifiably hip soundtrack, too-snarky-for-school protagonists, and intertitles set in cutesy curlicued fonts: Daydream Nation has it all. Which is to say it has nothing. Though ostensibly set in an oppressively dull rural burg, this debut film from writer/director Mike Goldbach packs in more dramatic contrivance, highfalutin romantic intrigue, and automobile collisions than a full-blown city symphony. But then, as out narrator and heroine Caroline (Kat Dennings) tells us in the film’s prologue, “this is the year that everything happened.”
After losing her mother to cancer, seventeen year-old Caroline and her father leave the city for a stultifying small town. Before long, Caroline makes friends with the school potheads, seduces a hunky teacher (Josh Lucas), lectures a fellow student on the cultural contradictions of promiscuity, and earns the aww-shucks affections of Thurston (Reece Thompson), a well-meaning stoner. (If you connected the dots between the name Thurston and the film’s title, you can congratulate yourself for being as passably cool as this film expects you to be.) Besides these over-eager hipster overtures, Daydream Nation doesn’t commit to its own mission of diagramming small town adolescent boredom. It’s a melancholy high school reminisce showcasing apocalyptic house parties, Red Shoe Diaries-styled sex scenes, a perpetually-burning and thematically-apposite industrial fire, and other trappings unbefitting its backdrop. Oh also, there is a serial killer on the loose, something any high school kid can relate to.
Though beautifully shot by cinematographer Jon Joffin, no amount of polish can gloss over the cracks running across the surface of Daydream Nation. And even the lush colour palette betrays Goldbach’s motive of rendering high school’s grey doldrums as a series of postcard-pretty snapshots.
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