20 Something, 2011.
Written and Directed by Lanze Spears.
SYNOPSIS:
A series of vignettes documenting the lives of five 20 somethings with aspirations to succeed in life.
Lanze Spears’ debut documentary 20 Something centres around five twenty-somethings living in cities in the United States. Each of them aspire to something and the documentary revolves around their individual aspirations. As a documentary, it fails on multiple levels. However as a piece of artistic filmmaking, it achieves a resonance and profundity that the information side of it lacks.
My main issue with Spears’ interviews with his subjects is the lack informative and interesting content they produce. It seems that whilst the audience’s expectations are set up to hear insights into these hopeless individuals’ lives, Spears essentially just lets them ramble and puts it in his movie as an interview. Extremely shaky camera work and amateurish effects don’t help for concentration either. Here Spears has five genuinely engaging characters as subjects and he fails to exploit them to their full potential. His portrayal of at least four of them demonstrates them, unfortunately, to be spoiled middle-class kids. Meanwhile, all of his subjects want to be either models, actors or artists. The film is not about models, actors and artists (or so I thought), it’s about kids in their twenties trying to find work. The narrow spectrum provided means that we are presented with interviewees who are essentially acting, and not well either.
Having already mentioned poor effects, I have to draw attention further to the number of still images of these “actors'” headshots and modelling photographs. It’s like Spears couldn’t pick one or two so he shoved all of them in there, one appearing on-screen at a deafeningly slow pace (I also noticed that way much more attention was given to the ladies’ modelling shots than the guy’s – and absolutely zero images of the two other guys’ artwork were shown). The same goes for title cards – the city, the characters… flashing up multiple times and taking us away from the action and story of the subjects. Artistically, it has its merits, but again, as a documentary, there is barely any informative content at all. There are far too many “filler” shots of the interviewees at parties and in clubs with their friends. I’m not sure how Spears expects his audience to believe his characters are struggling to find work and on the brink of poverty when he insists on filming them at nightclubs and bars. It’s not entirely convincing.
Spears says that his purpose in making 20 Something was to inspire young people not to give up their dreams. It may be because I’m British and not entirely familiar with American youth culture, but all this film inspired me to do was not be an actor. All these kids do (with the exception of one of them, Sean, who was the only one out of all of them that talked any sense) is do the least amount of work possible for the most amount of money, then whinge about how their dreams haven’t come true. Sorry if I don’t find that inspiring. Spears has failed what he set out to do with this “documentary”, which can more easily be called self-absorbed pat-on-the-back flattery.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
Kirsty Capes
Originally published January 1, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
