Writer/director Nicholas Colia’s delightful first-time feature film about an obsessive (queer) theater kid, which won several big awards at the Tribeca Festival last year, has now opened in cinemas (including the Quad Cinema in Manhattan), which makes this a good time to repost my review of it.
“Griffin in Summer” will inspire some of the same knowing laughs among grown-up theater kids as “Theater Camp,” and some of the same sympathetic sighs and cringes of recognition among grown-up queer kids as “Trevor” or “Fun Home.”
Fourteen-year-old Griffin Naffly (Everett Blunck) has written a very adult play entitled “Regrets of Autumn” that he describes as a cross between “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and “American Beauty.” He has planned to devote his summer to its world premiere production, despite the cluelessness of his mother Helen (Melanie Lynskey) who actually suggests he might take time out to go swimming or biking, and the exasperating lack of professionalism of the friends he’s enlisted to make it happen, who seem to prefer to party and date.
“You scheduled 60 hours of rehearsal a week,” complains his friend and director Kara (Abby Ryder Fortson.)
“It’s the Equity standard,” Griffin indignantly replies.
Griffin’s outrage reaches its peak when his mother hires a young man named Brad to clean the pool and do repairs around the house, who blasts music while he works, distracting Griffin from his rewrites. Griffin demands his mother fire him.
But then he takes a look at Brad. He also learns that the 25-year-old lived in New York City – which is where Griffin plans to move as soon as he turns 18. Brad has moved back in with his mother because he blew all his money on a one-man show; Brad is a performance artist.
It’s not long before Griffin makes his play less dark, reflecting less of his parents’ ugly marital conflict and more of his own yearnings. He conspires to fire his male lead, his friend Tyler (Gordon Rocks), whom he contemptuously dismisses as a “paraphraser,” and replace him with Brad. Brad is baffled. “Wouldn’t it be weird if I’m married to a tween?”
“Griffin in Summer” is well-served by a spot-on cast led by Everett Blunck, an actual 14-year-old (from Montana), who credibly invests Griffin both with an adolescent vulnerability and a seriousness that earns our respect even as we laugh. Owen Teague’s Brad is hunky, brooding and oblivious, a lethal combination.
The cast members portraying Griffin’s friends deserve just as much praise; they successfully navigate the seemingly impossible challenge of performing believably in the scenes from Griffin’s play. These are kids portraying angst-ridden adults, and it’s hilarious, but it’s not at their expense.
On the other hand, the mockery is dialed too high when it comes to Brad’s performance art (we see a video in his underwear yelling “House. Parents. Baby”) – not because it’s completely untrue, but because it’s been done too many times before. Along those same lines, the name of the suburb in which they live didn’t need to be called Borwood.
But if there is little new ground in the story, much of what makes “Griffin in Summer” so appealing is the respect that Colia pays to the process of making theater, and to the characters’ commitment to it.
