Kevin Smith (1994)
I knew of it but didn’t know, before reading the BFI note, how it got made: for $27,000, in three weeks, when twenty-three-year-old Kevin Smith – like the film’s protagonist – was a check-out clerk in New Jersey. Dante (Brian O’Halloran) has dropped out of college and works in a Quick Stop convenience store. His friend Randal (Jeff Anderson) has a job in a nearby video store and Smith’s film was made not long after Quentin Tarantino had demonstrated what that kind of job could lead to. It isn’t hard to understand why Clerks became a cult indie comedy. Given the circumstances of its creation, it’s an amazing piece of work. Even so, I found it less easy to experience it, fifteen years on, as a classic of its kind.
Clerks includes, as proof of Kevin Smith’s literacy, not just plenty of words but even punctuation. The action – which takes place during the course of a Saturday when both Randal and Dante find themselves at work – amounts to a succession of personal frustrations and crises for Dante, whose day off it should have been. The film is divided into sections each of which is introduced by a single word that suggests – straight-facedly – an academic, formalist approach. (The headings are ‘Vilification’, ‘Syntax’, ‘Vagary’, ‘Purgation’, ‘Malaise’, ’Harbinger’, ‘Perspicacity’, ‘Paradigm’, ‘Whimsy’, ‘Quandary’, ‘Lamentation’, ‘Juxtaposition’, ‘Catharsis’ and ‘Denouement’.) Except for two brief excursions – to the roof of the store for an abortive hockey game and on the road to a local funeral parlour – Clerks is shot inside or just in front of the minimart and video store. Because he had to film after hours, the metal shutters on the store where Smith worked were down; when Dante arrives at the Quick Store, he constructs a makeshift sign for the shutters. (He writes the words in shoe polish and his hands smell of it for the rest of the day.) The sign reads ‘I ASSURE YOU; WE’RE OPEN’ (although it doesn’t stop nearly everyone who comes into the store from asking, ‘Are you open?’). I really enjoyed that semi-colon. Inside, there are other hand-written notices, created by the same sarcastic wit (‘If you plan to shop lift, let us know’).
These are some of the good examples of Smith’s verbal facility but, although his script is clever, there’s too much of it and it’s written in a single voice. Smith himself plays Silent Bob, a role which is significant but, except for a few parting words of sexual worldly wisdom to Dante, non-speaking. The rest of the cast are good enough actors to do a character but they’re not sufficiently accomplished to give their readings the variety which, because it’s so copious, the dialogue badly needs. Lisa Spoonhauer, as Dante’s ex-girlfriend Caitlin, has more vocal colour (and looks more striking) than the others but she’s also one of the more self-conscious performers. The one-damned-thing-after-another structure works well enough (the film doesn’t really build) but I thought it was only the gross black comedy highlights that were really funny – and where the dialogue comes into its own. While his deliberately limited camera work can get tedious (ping-ponging between two characters having a conversation), Smith makes a virtue of budgetary constraints by having the most terrible incidents described in words rather than by staging them. An elderly male shopper asks to use the store’s toilet and for a porn magazine while he’s in there, and Dante reluctantly obliges. During the evening, Caitlin uses the facility even though the lights aren’t working and she can’t see. She emerges thinking she’s had great sex with Dante. It turns out to be the old man who had managed an erection before pegging out on the toilet floor. The erection is sustained in rigor mortis.
Some sequences start promisingly but are developed and resolved in a pretty conventional way. A succession of shoppers who want to buy cigarettes are deterred by a rabid anti-smoking campaigner. He turns out to work for the company that makes the gum he encourages people to buy instead of fags. Others, such as the routine with the macho creep of a customer who impugns Dante’s physical fitness, are just not very good. But there are also some decent small jokes with a pleasingly believable edge: Randal neglects his post to go and rent a movie from a better video store. The main characters may be whingers and/or slackers but they’re good company for most of the ninety-odd minutes. That said, by the end of their long Saturday, you share Dante’s and Randal’s anxiety to get out. I’m not sure this is due entirely to empathy. Jason Mewes is Jay, the talkative complement to Silent Bob in the duo of stoners who hang out in front of the shop. Marilyn Ghigliotti is Dante’s current girlfriend, Veronica. The film was shot in black and white by David Klein.
23 September 2009
