American Teen (DVD)

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Friends tell me that in a past life I taught high school. For almost forty years. Understandably, it was with a mixture of joy and dread that I approached producer-writer-director Nanette Burstein's 2008 documentary "American Teen." The film did well at the Sundance Film Festival, where the festival nominated it for their Grand Jury Prize and Ms. Burstein won the Directing Award.

So, asks the movie, were you a rebel, a jock, a princess, a heartthrob, or a geek in high school? Those are the perspectives from which Ms. Burstein ("The Kid Stays in the Picture") looks at what one must suppose is her concept of typical high school life. You say you weren't any of those stereotypes? That's only the first of several drawbacks the documentary contains. So let me get the messy parts out of the way first, my objections to the film.

Indiana teens Hannah Bailey, Colin Clemens, Megan Krizmanich, Mitch Reinholt, and Jake Tusing play themselves in this examination of everyone's senior year. The idea is that Mr. Burstein attempts to go behind these clichéd and superficial stereotypes to show us what these characters are really like. One can hardly fault the writer-director's noble ambition, if only it had worked out that way. In fact, the movie itself, while admittedly touching at times, hardly scratches the surface of teenage life, making everything a little too facile to ring true, with just about every element of teenage angst possible crammed into these five lives.

What's more, I find it strange that Ms. Burstein made no effort to represent a serious cross section of American teenagers. All five main characters are white, middle class, and attractive. I'm sorry, but that is not the teenage life that I remember, which included people of all shapes, sizes, colors, and backgrounds. OK, I grew up in California, and New Yorker Burstein went to Indiana to shoot her movie; maybe these five main characters were all the diversity she wanted or that she could find. So, why go to Indiana? Ostensibly, it is the center of middle America. But I don't think it truly represents today's America--not culturally, not ethnically, not even economically. The movie's setting and characters are closer to a "Father Knows Best" or "Ozzie and Harriet" America, which I thought existed only in movies. Well, this IS a movie, after all, so what do I know.

The proportion of three boys to two girls also puzzled me. If Ms. Burstein wanted to make her film genuinely representative of teen life, then why not offer an equal number of boys to girls: Three and three or two and two? Unless in Indiana the boys really do outnumber the girls by a ratio of three to two. I dunno.

Lastly, and before I mention what the film is about, I have to mention that "American Teen" is one of the oddest "documentaries" I have seen. I mean, people usually use the term "documentary" to describe something that a filmmaker takes directly from or recreates from actual events, real life. In "American Teen," Ms. Burstein follows her five "real-life" subjects around with video cameras for an entire school year, editing together her 101-minute motion picture from what must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of tape. Is that actually real life? Is it fair to say that this is what life for an American teen is like when we get only a few minutes of hand-selected highlights from an entire senior year?

Then, as a topper, we're expected to believe that the characters in this documentary actually said and did all the things they said and did with a camera trained on them all the while. For instance, a girlfriend of one of the boys cheats on him, which she does on camera, and then she tells the boy she never cheated on him. Did she expect to keep this thing a secret with a million viewers watching her? This is not a "Candid Camera" affair. The cast knows when the camera is on them. It's a mystery to me.

Anyway, here are the five characters: First, there's Hannah Bailey, the so-called rebel, the artistic type. She's not in the popular crowd because she likes music and film and photography and art over sports and dances and student council and cheerleading. She wants more than anything to escape Indiana, which is perhaps why the director chose Indiana in the first place. She wants to go to California after graduation and study film. She wants to live in San Francisco and go to San Francisco State. The fact that I identified the most with Hannah has nothing, I'm sure, to do with my having graduated from San Francisco State.

Second, there's Colin Clemens, the jock. Colin is the school's star basketball player, friendly, nice, everybody's buddy. But he feels he's under tremendous pressure always to win. He needs desperately to get a college scholarship because his dad, an Elvis impersonator (?), doesn't have the money to pay for all of his expenses. Colin and his father envision a successful college basketball career for him, followed by eventual pro stardom.