Griffin in Summer (2024)

Griffin-in-Summer-(2024)
Griffin in Summer (2024)

With the mainstream American comedy market becoming ever dumber, Colia and his Griffin in Summer is a breath of fresh air. Full of both grit and humor at different interludes, L.A.-based director Nicholas Colia has once again pulled the difficult task of addressing an unsettling issue with laugh-out-loud moments. Moreover, the film’s strain of comedy deserves a shout-out because there’s a consistent pace of gags throughout the movie. In Griffin in Summer, Colia strives, with equal success, for heartfelt drama and belly laughs.

Blunck, the director’s leading lady, is brilliant in the role of Griffin, a wannabe playwright who happens to be 14 years of age. Griffin lives in a small town that appears to be very dull and uninteresting to him and his fellow friends. He has stars in his eyes and looks forward to moving to New York when he turns eighteen. New York’s rich artistic culture has him excited but until then, Griffin has to put up with an average basement where he can rehearse with friends. Autumnal blues to build tension.

Smart and clever Griffin seems to annoy many people, largely due to the fact that he is a smart ass. Things go south for him when he tries to make his ‘actors’ put in 60 hours of work rehearsal time over the summer which is unreasonable because it’s the ‘Equity standard’. His actors want to be 14 during the summer and do teenage things, and not perform. His ‘director’ Kara (Abby Ryder Fortson), has now ditched him as well for a vacation with her boyfriend’s family. You’d think it was some sort of conspiracy at work why can’t these idiots see the importance of his work?

Brad Teague (Owen Teague) is in his twenties and Griffin ends up befriending him on an unlikely artistic alliance. Griffin’s mum, Melanie Lynskey, has hired him to do some chores over the summer. Brad made Griffin’s creative work “headaches,” he blasted music and interrupted him using the logical point that ‘art comes from a quiet body’ when trying to remove Brad from the house. However, the promise of ‘ all the time in the world’ to hit Stoner was far too difficult for Griffin to ignore and reach his biceps. In the most famous scene from ‘Happiness’ directed by Todd Solondz, Griffin performs much more eloquently; using the liquid courage of misting the drinks of older men to have them spend time with said younger.

It is none other than Griffin who is astonished when Brad tells him that he is also “a performance artist” and spends loads of time in New York. He really feels like he has finally found his lifelong partner. But as in most cases concerning one’s teenage crushes, it turns out later that Brad is a complete idiot, an intellectual caveman to Griffin, and quite a jerk as well.

The most crucial aspect of this love story is Griffin’s heartbreak and the irony in his situation. The humor of the story lies in the fact that Brad, the centerpiece of Griffin’s entirely inappropriate yet loveable obsession, isn’t on the same level, let alone the same wavelength. It only took one sentence about bragging about himself as an artist for Griffin to completely alter his perception of Brad the mouth breather. Even after watching one of Brad’s atrocious performances on stage, the Yeti’s ‘angel behind the fence’ was even more venerated by Griffin. It never occurred to him that Griffin could be staring at him for a reason or that he could get used to the sight of a young boy completely manipulating him: like trying to get rid of Brad’s stupid (and really funny) girlfriend, Kathryn Newton.

Blunck now gets to perform on screen as we see Griffin attempting to engage a rather indifferent school with a solo extract of his new play right at the beginning of the movie. It’s absolutely ridiculous to watch, with this poor kid providing a most grotesquely exaggerated version of his vision of “adult drama” properly wheezing with laughter as he watches his friends go through more of the same routines. There is a concern that the film will simply rely on the sight of children acting like adults for easy laughs, but Colia’s movie does not take long to put such an apprehension at rest as it has much more than good old-fashioned fun.

Then, among all the stupid and cringeworthy jokes about the main plot, the issue of how one’s engagement with art can be a lonely struggle to some comes out to the foreground. It feels like with every decade art becomes more and more obsolete, and those who attempt to conserve it are derided and regarded solely as elitists by a less and less educated society. Between the two of them, Brad appears to have no real talent and it is anyone’s guess what Griffin’s career as a playwright will look like, but what they both possess in fact is a love for art that’s so hard to come by in our day and age that you can’t help but cheer for their enthusiasm. Griffin is the kind of kid who many grown-up people, who view the world as a highway for expenses rather than experiences, will probably tell to quit his dreams, which makes this summer perhaps the peak of his creative ambitions. It’s amusing to see how Brad and Griffin perceive art and the sarcastic portrayal of Colia goes towards the real target of the satire: the Babylonian society that has outcasted the artists.

Griffin in Summer is an unceremoniously biting film but one that has sweetness embedded in it. In the end, it is quite touching and somewhat optimistic in the sense that all outcasts need to stop being outcasts to find a few other outcasts and they don’t need to even be warm and cuddly, just normal.

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