Perhaps the most enjoyable movie I saw at Sundance last year, Rocket Science has just come out on DVD and was just as fun to watch a second time. The movie works on many levels: it’s an off-beat, quirky (and on a side note, when did “quirky” become the most used word to talk about movies, and when did that unequivocally become a compliment – a discussion for another time I suppose) comedy that falls in line with many Wes Anderson/Alexander Payne films. It would be impossible to not see this film as a coming of age story, which it is, to some extent. But the real beauty of this film, and why I fell in love with it, is because it is really about the process of searching. And while searching is normally relegated to high school/coming of age stories, it is not because most people have found what they were searching for by adulthood, but because they simply got tired of searching.
The film has the unnerving ability to swing from serious to droll to outright hilarious in the blink of an eye. Jeffery Blitz’s sophomore feature film has a stranglehold on the high school condition like few movies. The film’s star, Hal Heffner, stumbles through high school with an unpredictable stutter which gives flesh to the issue that surrounds so much of high school (and adulthood): finding your voice. We spend so much of our lives regurgitating, repackaging, and rehashing things that were never ours to begin with. It’s so easy for other people’s phrases to replace actual thoughts in our head that we often forget to actually think and substitute a juxtaposition of canned phrases. So many people spend a lot of time trying to figure out what their voice really is. Eventually the really dangerous questions creep in: Do I really have anything to say? What do I really know? Do I have more questions than answers?
The questions I am forced to ask are, “Why do we have such an obsession with knowing?” Why does searching so often feel like purgatory? We have this desire to pin things down and wrestle them to the ground, but is that really what we want? What would it look like to celebrate searching the way we celebrate knowing? Towards the end of the film, Hal remarks to his dad, "I wonder when it all starts to make sense?" to which he replies “You get to a point, and you’re living in Jersey, or someplace just like it, and you stop trying to figure it all out. Then you’re just happy for what you have.” Is there more beauty in searching for something than actually having it, or simply settling for something less? Is that, the genesis of movement – the searching? Even earlier in the film, Hal’s utterly unhelpful speech pathologist tells him “You have to get out of your own way here. Go back to living the way you were before you tried to exceed your limitations.”
Hal’s choice becomes to follow the advice he’s gotten, and stop trying to figure it all out, or keep searching. My choice becomes whether I’m more content to tell people what I think I know, or help people continue to search alongside me.
The question really becomes, do I love the unknown?
