Review - Too Cool To Be Forgotten
As the movie world jumps into Apatowmania (or is it Roganmania?), Alex Robinson’s “Too Cool To Be Forgotten” may function as the perfect companion/antidote. Robinson manages to tread the same territory — being a grown-up isn’t so bad, being a man-child isn’t so advisable — while not succumbing to the mentality it dissects. In this way, it’s a lot more like Apatow’s earlier and best work, the television series “Freaks and Geeks,” with a mix of nostalgia and uneasy truths as it examines the cliches that ring true.
Andy Wicks wants to quit smoking and takes his wife’s suggestion of visiting a hypnotist. As he relaxes into his trance, he finds himself trapped in his 15-year-old body in 1985, reliving his high school years, with no sign of ever being able to leave. His mission, as he understands it, is to never smoke his first cigarette, which he did that very summer. What he realizes as he traverses the landscape of a ghost world is that the actions of an adult, even the most everyday ones, are not something to be altered so easily — and painlessly.
As Robinson reveals, the big secret we grown-ups hold is that the high school years, they actually aren’t so great. I think most people settled into their lives and reasonably happy would never want to return to them. Of course, you don’t want to bluntly tell a high school kid this — they live in fish bowls and it’s like cracking the bowl. Besides, they’ll figure it out once they get past it.
The common mistake among high schoolers, though, is to believe that adults are jealous when we’re merely just annoyed at having to relive the horribleness and that we are trying to protect teenagers needlessly from a natural growing process. Be on our end of the road and say that. What adults are really trying to do is prevent teenagers from doing the things we all do that build regrets, obsessions, dysfunctions, wounds that never heal, situations that become repeated behavior . . . the stuff that happens to all of us and send us into therapy and divorces and loads of other depressing things. It’s a thankless and impossible job, but adults are as wired to attempt to prevent that fate for teenagers as teenagers are to embrace it.
Andy Wicks faces all these realizations head on. While plenty of stories in movies and elsewhere have presented the idea of an adult inhabiting a young body, Robinson really investigates the philosophical and psychological side of such an existence in a way I’ve never encountered before. What promises to be a silly and cliched story given the set-up turns into an incredibly mature and thoughtful examination of those years. Robinson draws us into the teenage fishbowl and then drags us out via the implications.
It’s a grand book of anger, disappointment and relief and highly recommended.
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