Little Athens (2005)

Finely conceived and convincingly performed...

Featuring a smart young cast of rising stars, Tom Zuber's second feature is a caustic and consuming look at disaffected small-town American youth. Little Athens is as ironic as its title suggests. If Athens is the birthplace of Western civilization and democracy, representing a legacy of supreme achievements, how then does Little Athens, a small, sleepy town in Arizona, represent the state of the world two thousand years later?

The picture painted is grim, even if its canvas is filled with sunny vistas, manicured lawns and crystalline pools. Caught in a dead-end, post-high-school void, the youth of Little Athens are a strange assortment of ragtag characters, constantly at each other's throats. As in a Robert Altman movie, a series of stories overlaps over a twenty-four-hour period, each one finely conceived and convincingly performed. Heather (Erica Leerhsen) is a neurotic EMS worker convinced that her boyfriend, a handsome young cop, is cheating on her. Jimmy ( John Patrick Amedori), wide-eyed and tousle-haired, delivers pizza, works in a gym and deals drugs to get out from under a sizeable debt. Two slacker roommates, Corey (DJ Qualls) and Pedro (Jorge Garcia) clean pools, but their meagre earnings are not enough to pay the rent. And then there is Jessica ( Jill Ritchie), living on her mother's couch, who learns that her boyfriend is out to get her for giving him an STD.

The film evokes so many other films about troubled teens - Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, American Graffiti, Kids - but it is very much its own entity, a distinctive and arresting accomplishment. Each encounter in the film is a confrontation, oppositional and antagonistic. Close friends do little to comfort one another; they are too busy protecting their own selfish interests, clawing to get ahead or simply to maintain their position. Surviving in this Darwinian world requires a special skill set that Zuber and his co-screenwriter and brother, Jeff Zuber, capture with unerring precision. Quite a portrait of the new millennium!

- Review by Piers Handling,
- Director, Toronto International Film Festival December 5, 2006

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