Reality Bites
First screened in February 1994 / Most recently screened and reviewed in May 2024
Director: Ben Stiller. Cast: Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, Steve Zahn, Joe Don Baker, Swoosie Kurtz, John Mahoney, Andy Dick, Keith David, Anne Meara, David Spade, Renée Zellweger. Screenplay: Helen Childress. VOR:③
Partly on merits, principally on vibes, an enduring reference point for Gen X sense and (mostly) sensibility. Ryder, Hawke defy typecasting.
I first saw Reality Bites in the theater as a mid-90s junior in high school, which is almost certainly the best way to see it. I next saw it three days ago as the middle-aged convalescent of a lingering illness (yep, that one) for which absorbing nostalgia is almost as palliative as extra-strength Tylenol and weapons-grade Robitussin.
I'm positively disposed toward Reality Bites, and the thing I probably like best about it on second pass is how easygoing it is—almost slackerish, you might say—about core plot dynamics on which it might have over-exerted itself. We're not that far into the movie before Lelaina (Winona Ryder) has got a choice to make between an unpromising but not-bad fling with a vaguely defined 90s yuppie media exec whose name doesn't matter (Ben Stiller) and the strongly hinted but, on both sides, vigorously denied attraction between her and Troy (Ethan Hawke). Troy to this day is the very prototype of the stringy-haired, Sugar Ray-faced, coffee-swilling, free-floatingly contemptuous poet/frontman/couchsurfer who might even think of himself as a philosopher. Bad news who smells like good news. A learning experience you'll majorly groan about later.
Such are the options, for the rather wan Lelaina—a little old to still be so doe-eyed, a lot callow to be her university's valedictorian—and also for us. Again, it's a good thing that Stiller's direction doesn't force-feed us this would-be romantic dilemma, even as I gather he punched it up from Helen Childress's even more sprawly and lackadaisical original script. Reality Bites plays as less of a story than a hang. Even in 1994, it felt less about its plot beats and more about how people cut or didn't cut their hair, what they chose among available radio-dial offerings to suit what mood. How they precisely calibrated their disaffection for any given setting or scenario. How they spiced the air not so much with bon mots as with half-zesty, half-weary, frequently insensible attempts at badinage (assez mots? demi-mots?), yet still somehow wrung some rudimentary charisma out of them.
Amid that almost unbroken ambience, Janeane Garofalo's pleasingly peppery supporting performance carries as much weight as the characters who are on screen three times as much—almost the way Thelma Ritter could loom over a movie where she only had three scenes. The sudden-onset exuberance of The Knack's "My Sharona" in a gas station convenience store, which is a signature scene in Reality Bites despite being brief and having nothing to do with anything, matters more than who does or doesn't wind up with whom at the end (of which I had retained no recall whatsoever from 1994). Lisa Loeb's masterly uptempo ballad "Stay (I Missed You)," not even heard till the end credits, Lelaina's long night of gab with a 1-900 psychic, Garofalo's anxieties about an HIV test... these are the key threads in the movie's thrift-store fabric, and Stiller has directed everything with the kind of loose, light weave that suggests that's all on purpose, rather than a case of peripheral pleasures riding to the rescue of three blurry leads in a wispily constructed screenplay.
I'm not going to call this a work of directorial genius. I'm not even going to pretend I was as impressed or entertained as I was as a teenaged mixtape-maker. You could shape Reality Bites as Stiller has done, as a vibe, a lark, a feature adaptation of The Real World, a movie slouching listlessly in its own doorway, and still get things right that Stiller, Childress, and the cast collectively whiff. Troy doesn't need to be this disdainful, with quite so many soliloquies or open-mic moments that strongly suggest Hawke's own overconfident authorial hand. Lelaina's video projects ought to be less excruciatingly amateur, especially once their raffish appeal or even "artistic promise" becomes a key plot point. Steve Zahn's Sammy, since he's in the movie, oughta be, like, in the movie. I'm not asking for the stars here.
But I do like the songs and the ways they are used, and I do like that Eugenie Bafaloukos's costumes seem both character-specific and broadly evocative of the era, as much now as they did then, without looking like they've tried too hard. I admire how the cinematography, by some young punk called Emmanuel Lubezki, makes everyone look so human-on-the-street and yet so casually spiffy that these are still the faces, the complexions, the silhouettes I think of first when I think of Ryder, of Hawke, of Garofalo—all, again, without the lighting calling any attention to itself whatsoever, or signaling even briefly that you'd want to join this world of cigarettes and hand-me-down futons. (Joke's on me: I'm typing this from my decades-old hand-me-down futon, and I'm 46.)
Maybe what I like best is that Stiller got a cast of pretty dissimilar performers to harmonize just enough to cohere as an ensemble, without any pressure to fit all their edges and colors together. He even got them into some grooves that feel plausibly improv'd, whether or not they actually were. That's a level of relaxation I never thought I'd see from Ryder, in particular, overpraised before this movie in projects that locked her into historical periods and auteurist styles in which she seemed utterly lost, and adrift shortly afterward in a career that survives now as kind of a sad-face emoji. Her acting, per se, in Reality Bites is less crafty or inspired than I'd let myself imagine, and I still don't really know who Lelaina is. (I get it, Lelaina also doesn't know; that's not what I mean.) But Ryder looks like she's having a grand time, jamming in the different ways that Stiller and Hawke and Garofalo like to jam, jamming even in scenes where she's alone.
While Lelaina in no way dominates my viewing experience, I feel during Reality Bites like I'm watching Ryder try on the costume of a member of her own generation—one for which she remains iconic, but one from which I suspect she always felt in many ways out of step: drawn into a working world so early, then posed like a doll by directors like Coppola and Scorsese with no feel for her or her otherwise-absent peer group; frequently cast away from her strengths or above her training level, then more or less abandoned even by us Xers as we got wind she was ...erratic. Almost overnight, her movies stopped making any case for themselves. Lelaina isn't prepossessingly happy in Reality Bites. Absolutely nobody is, which is most of the point, and also why it's so pleasing that the movie never feels like a mopefest or a broad-brush generational critique. But Ryder seems happy: maybe even the happiest I ever saw her, and certainly the loosest. The movie's about her as much as about her character: the valedictorian of her Hollywood class, whose peak seemed to pass, poor thing, while she was still standing at the podium. Pathos and disappointment would follow, but we didn't know that in 1994, and I don't think about it now while I'm watching. She's a cool girl. She's in a troupe she enjoys—and which she, Ryder, had no small part in assembling, and then preserving amid conflict. Her thespian limits are palpable even here, but ooh, she makes our motor run, our motor run. Here more than anywhere, she's Our Winona. Grade:B
