Best Keanu: “It gets worse when you get older. This inescapable shit.”

Generation Um is one of those films I’m not sure what to do with.

I settled on three stars out of five, which is the same number of stars I gave to Point Break. If you had to choose how to spend your time, and could only watch one, I’d suggest the first 45 minutes of Generation Um. You can skip the second half. And skip Point Break entirely.

There’s some peaceful beauty in the first 45 minutes of Generation Um, all of which is basically undone by whatever is going on in the second half. In the early scenes, we see Keanu — who, unbelievably, is at least in his mid-40s by this point (49 by the time the film was released) — existing in New York City.

In one scene, he silently eats a cupcake. This is independent filmmaking. But it has its appeal somehow, and you kind of gloss over the obligatory scenes of two women in a New York City apartment, doing the obligatory drugs, sleeping, and wandering around in their underwear.

(I postulate this: most women in this situation would choose sweats and a baggy t-shirt. But most women are not characters in an independent film made in the early 2010s.)

There are some early hints of interesting stuff going on with the Keanu character, John, who receives a card in the mail from his mother for his birthday. Enclosed there’s a check for $75 with a note in the memo field: “Medication!” He’s letting a relative crash at his place, appears to repair some kind of ancient electronic by picking apart some wires, and his cat seems adverse to his offer of food.

And he steals stuff, including a video camera someone left on the ground during some kind of outdoor line dancing (or similar) competition. This results in the film’s chase scene, as a crowd of line dancers runs after him all the way to the subway, where John escapes with the camera still in hand.

But we never learn what kind of medication John’s mom thought he should be taking. What we’re given instead is scene after scene of John filming the two women, inviting them to open up about whatever horror stories they want to expose on camera.

He knows them, of course, so the intimacy is not entirely random. But it quickly becomes an exploitation narrative within an exploitation narrative, where John can’t reveal his own pain when he turns the camera on himself (saying only “um,” as in, we can presume, Generation Um), but seems to think nothing of asking the women to tell their horrific tales of abuse.

Ultimately, it moves from something pleasantly interesting to something with few redeeming qualities. To be generous to the filmmaker, one could assume he wanted the audience to understand the pain of these women. To be more objective, one could say he’s using the pain narrative to reduce and objectify them. There’s a word for that. Trauma porn, I think. Or something like that.

As for Keanu, I had one thought as John was sitting in a diner waiting to meet with another person to whom he gives a packet of receipts. (Another detail that’s not fully explained, although at the very end, when John himself takes a receipt from one of the women and puts it in a brown envelope, I presume we’re meant to make an inference). I thought, “I’ll bet he just really likes acting.” Which is a weird thing to think. But plenty of actors would have passed on a film like this; one could argue maybe Keanu should have passed on it too. But in that scene, conversing with the waitress, he looked comfortable, like a performer in his element.

Even better when he’s eating a cupcake.

March 2022