Tribeca 2005 Review: rockaway

Posted Apr 24, 2005, 2:29 PM ET by Karina Longworth
Filed under: Festival Reports, Drama, Independent

0142.jpgTeenage identity is a weird thing - much weirder than popular culture usually acknowleges. A lot of the camp value in things like Beverly Hills, 90210 and The O.C. comes from the fact that we're often asked to believe that these 16-year-olds have fully-formed personalities. For all of Seth Cohen's suppossed geekiness on The O.C., he knows himself far better than any teenage boy I've ever met. rockaway, a kind of situation docu-drama by Mark Street, operates in the realm of constantly shifting teenage identity. Like an actual teenager the film can be frustrating - at times it's hard to know how to handle it, because it's hard to determine how well it knows itself.

The film tracks Kelly (Laura Johnson), Jaunita (Jennifer Brown) and Merida (Vanessa Yuille), three friends partying away their last night of high school and flashing back to various recent landmarks of their lives and friendships. Kelly, by far the most fascinating of the trio, is struggling to define herself as a woman, and defend herself against crippling depression, in the wake of her mother's recent death. She starts sleeping with a man her father's age, for little reason other than that she can. "Why am I having sex with a man with white hair?" she asks in voice-over. "He's a loser. He's old enough to be my father, and he's a loser. But I keep going back." 

There's enough material in Kelly's story alone to sustain the whole film - but there are two other protagonists to deal with. Merida, a wild-eyed vixen in an ever-changing array of cheap cotton halter tops, has grown up poor and has never questioned her belief that her looks and "talent" are going to change that. Her identity is so shallow, so quasi-formed, that her faux-confident monlogues made my skin crawl.  Jaunita, the least fleshed-out of the three, seems to exist to anchor the group in some kind of straight-arrow morality: someone has to be there to roll their eyes at Kelly and Merida as they giggle their way through a shirtless-boy-induced attack of killer hormones.

Rockaway Beach , an area of Queens, is geographically about as far from Manhattan as you can get and still technically be in one of the Five Burroughs. rockaway's production notes pay lip service to the film being about watching the girls "negotiate the tension between city and suburb that is so much a part of living in this section of New York City" - but to me that came off as, at best, the film's peripheral concern. These girls don't seem to define Rockaway in terms of it being vs. Manhattan, as much as they define it as being vs. Everywhere Else. And there's a common sense that Everywhere Else is where life is really going to happen; the film seems to be about jumping the requisite emotional hurdles in order to get there.

rockaway is beautifully shot. Street and cinematographer Andrew Black paint a mood portrait of the working-class community under the flight path of JFK as never fully utopic or dystopic, but always a muddle of each. Some of the production elements - a lush soundtrack interweaving the ambient elements of passing trains, crashing waves, and overhead planes; the matte stillness of properly-color-corrected DV - are so lovely that they almost beg for a quieter film.

But - as teenagers are wont to do, I guess - Kelly, Jaunita and Merida insist on being heard, and Street crowds the filmspace with their voiceovers and monologues. Whenever the girls talk about themselves, they do so as if reading aloud from a diary. These speeches feel cloyingly "acted", which is weird, because in form and content,  rockaway is otherwise very good about making its three protagonists (although don't get me started on its adults) seem like real people. At some point it starts to feel as though the monologues and voiceovers are some kind of perverse experiment in artificiality, one which might have its place in another film, but ultimately only provide distraction in this one.

Return to Home Page