'The Graduate' influences female-laden 'Laggies'
Director Lynn Shelton feels a quarter-life crisis is rife for as much drama and comedy nowadays as it was in the 1960s when Benjamin Braddock was getting seduced by Mrs. Robinson.
Shelton's Laggies (out Friday) might focus on the millennial generation, yet its story of 28-year-old Megan (Keira Knightley) being caught between adolescence and adulthood puts a female take on the 1967 Dustin Hoffman-Anne Bancroft comedy-drama as well as old-school bromances such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
"My ultimate continuing fascination as an artist is exploring that question of 'Who am I and what is my place in the world?' " Shelton says. "The identity crisis is something that could happen to us at any point of time in our lives, and I think does happen to everybody at least once but usually several times."
It could be a big or little thing that can make a person take stock of life, and for Megan, it's a marriage proposal. Instead of using her advanced degree to find a career, she schleps signs by the road promoting her dad's business, still fosters rad skateboard skills and prefers comfy, college-age threads to the adult wardrobe of the friends from whom she's slowing drifting away.
But the ring sends her running until Megan meets Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz), a mature-for-her-age 16-year-old who takes in her new older friend for a week, much to the chagrin of Annika's single dad (Sam Rockwell).
Like Megan, "she's kind of really confused about who she is," says Moretz, 17. "Her mom left the family when she was 13, and she's now kind of a typical divorced kid, thinking 'I don't know who I am or what I want to be. My dad doesn't even care.'
"She meets this 28-year-old who's also going through a crisis and they kind of have this weird coming-of-age story together that is super-random."
On paper, Megan and Annika should be in totally different walks of life and aren't supposed to be able to have a real friendship, Shelton adds. "But they really do and it's believable."
Other than Thelma & Louise, the director feels women haven't gotten to explore that male "buddy movie" trope on screen the way audiences saw with Butch and Sundance in 1969 or more recently with the dudes of Superbad.
Shelton also saw Laggies as a way to transpose The Graduate in a female direction. The Mike Nichols film cast Hoffman as Braddock, fresh out of college and wondering where he's going in his life before a summer of nights spent with the older wife (Bancroft) of his father's law partner.
It hit a chord with Jeff Garlin, who plays Megan's father in Laggies. He had his own life-defining moment when he was 20 and dropped out of film studies at the University of Miami to begin a stand-up comedy career. "I could say any movie I make or any movie I think about has to have some level of The Graduate in it," Garlin says with a laugh.
It was before her time, but the movie also had "a huge effect on me," says Shelton, 49. "It was a very iconic version of that quarter-life crisis, and it was a bummer that there was nothing out there along those lines that I could relate to with a female character in the main role. For a long time we as women were expected to have our acts together and to be the mature one."
When Shelton first read Andrea Seigel'sLaggies script, she says she found it immediately refreshing because it allowed female characters the same slack as men "to actually find their own way and to be real and to be flawed and backpedal and make up for their mistakes."
But she sees the movie as a journey that's timeless, with its themes being universal for both genders.
"It's been in the zeitgeist for longer than just this generation," the filmmaker says. "A lot of people choose to be baristas or what have you to take their time to figure out what they want to do and where they want to be and who they want to be with. That just actually feels very healthy and OK to me."
Contributing: Claudia Puig