One of the nice things about sheltering here with my girlfriend for the past month or so has been our movie nights on weekends. Between streaming services, her DVR and things we're generally interested in, we've managed to find some good stuff - for example, we're alternating between the films of Chadwick Boseman (RIP) and those of Pauly Shore. But one of the first we watched was Pete Davidson and Judd Apatow's King of Staten Island.
I think we were both intrigued by the trailer, and the movie itself is pretty good - it takes most of the good stuff about Pete Davidson and very little of the stuff that annoys me, and places it in a believable context of showing his character coming to terms with his firefighter father's death ten years earlier, and his growth from fuck-up wannabe tattoo artist to a (potential) adult. There are probably spoilers for the movie after the jump, so be forewarned.
But what struck me was the opening scene, before the credits: we see Pete driving down the highway as the song "Pursuit of Happiness" by Kid Cudi and MGMT plays over it. He steels himself, closes his eyes, and hits the accelerator, but then after an agonizingly long close-up on his face, he opens his eyes again. When he sees how close he is to the car in front, he panics and swerves past, clipping its back fender, and mutters "Sorry, sorry" repeatedly as he looks in the rearview mirror.
I liked how the scene encapsulated, with almost no dialogue, the main character's state at the start of the movie. He's aware of how screwed up his life is, and is so emotionally stunted that all he can think of to get out of it is suicide. But as we see when he opens his eyes at the last possible moment, he doesn't actually want to kill himself - and also, he's too much of a screwup to do it properly, as evidenced by him sideswiping the car in front of him as he tries to avoid rear-ending it at high speed.
And capping it off is him apologizing in the rearview mirror - that could be to the car he clipped, or to his family, or to himself, but it's a good character moment.
I can't help seeing it through the lens of all the how-to resources on screenwriting that I've been consuming for the past couple of years. Save the Cat might say this is the moment where we see what kind of character the protagonist is. But I also think about it in comparison to the 3-Page Challenges that John August and Craig Mazin review on their Scriptnotes podcast from time to time - a thing I've noticed about those is how they frequently start with some character behaving badly, and the movie will presumably be about why they're that way, and how they grow past it.
This opening scene presents us with the mystery of why this young guy is driven to attempt suicide, and why he doesn't follow through. After the title card, we see that his life consists of smoking weed with his friends, carrying on a friends-with-benefits arrangement with a girl who clearly likes him, and living off of his widowed mom. He dreams of becoming a tattoo artist but his talent isn't developed enough, and he's essentially holding back those around him with his immaturity.
The situation changes when he tattoos some kid who runs into him and his friends, and the kid's dad starts dating Pete's mom after he comes to complain about the tattoo. This shift forces him to take on a soul-destroying restaurant job, and to start walking the would-be stepdad's children to school every morning. As he goes on, he learns more about what his dad was actually like, as opposed to the venerated version that his mom has kept a shrine to for all these years - and at the end, when he's started to find his path forward, both with his friends and with his girlfriend, you get the sense he's not going to try to commit suicide again.
I'm sure I could do a more in-depth discussion of the entire movie, but I'm particularly fascinated with beginnings, as they always contain the potential for a great story - potential that is sometimes squandered. I wouldn't say it's squandered here, though - as I say, we're presented with this slice of life scene where Pete tries half-heartedly to kill himself, and the rest of the movie shows us why he's like that and what he needs to learn to be able to move forward.
It's not like a novel's opening scene, in that it doesn't necessarily contain all the themes that we're going to be exploring in the story, but it's close. And Pete Davidson carries the performance well enough that he's enjoyable to watch (I don't say this about everything I see him in). Further, Judd Apatow is a good enough writer that I feel I can trust him to take me on a journey in his films, whether the 40-Year-Old Virgin or This is 40 - the combination of the two makes for a pretty good movie, one that's well worth a watch.
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