“As we get older, we all come to a fork in the road.” So goes the narration at a climactic moment in All Summers End, a warmly photographed, inconsistently acted and terribly maudlin coming-of-age movie that practically dots its i‘s with crying faces. “And as we choose our path,” the narrator continues, with the benefit of retrospective wisdom (if not a good script), “some of us get wiser – and some of us don’t.” Unfortunately, this well-meaning low-budget indie falls squarely into the latter category.
The movie is set sometime in the not-too-distant past. Conrad (Mud’s Tye Sheridan) is a small-town teenager excited about the Fourth of July fireworks display just around the corner. He’s just about outgrown his boyhood chums, who are a few years younger than he is anyway, and he’s ready for young love with Grace (Kaitlin Dever). But Conrad’s friends talk him into a holiday joyride that changes all of their young lives, leading to a car accident that kills Grace’s older brother Eric. Wracked with guilt, Conrad can’t bring himself to tell Grace about his role in her brother’s death, and he tries to ingratiate himself with her and her family.
Clearly this won’t end well, but starting with the belabored pyrotechnic metaphor, it didn’t begin well, either. It is indeed a fact that all summers end, and that all too many coming-of-age movies include fireworks that burn brightly but all too quickly, and that conflicted teenage boys will encounter a deer in the forest that spurs them to do the right thing. Sheridan is likeable enough, and you can almost see Conrad as a continuation of his guilt-ridden young role in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. But Sheridan can’t do much with writer-director Kyle Wilamowski’s script, which manages to avoid Malick’s signature twirling but is still wall-to-wall young adult melodrama.
Wilamowski has been kicking around the screenplayGrass Stains (a more evocative title than its generic replacement) since 2007, when it won honors from Columbia University, where he earned his MFA, and the Austin Film Festival. More than a decade later, the writer-director has made his feature debut with the retitled project, which is clearly a labor of love. Regrettably, love doesn’t make good movies. The 87-minute runtime is down from an original length of 110 minutes, and it’s hard to imagine even more of this. Yet that may well be the reason the facepalms keep ramping up in the final act, from unconvincing supporting performances to cliched dialogue and narration to symbolism that might as well be wearing a flashing neon sign.
Even failed teenage dramas can pull some resonance out of the subgenre’s ubiquitous tropes, or by a soundtrack choice that delivers an unexpected charge. To its credit (and perhaps because clearances were beyond its budget), the producers opted for an original soundtrack, but that leads to the final eye-rolling cliché, as the end credits roll under a song called, wait for it … “Too Young to Burn.” All Summers End inadvertently suggests that it may be best to turn down the temperature on those overheated teenage dramatics.
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