It’s not every day you hear James Joyce and William Faulkner mentioned in a teen comedy movie. That’s just one of the ways this surprisingly likeable little film sets itself apart from the formulaic weaknesses of its genre.
The story is familiar enough. Shaun Brumder (Colin Hanks, son of Tom) lives in the titular California county, where he whiles away his young life surfing with his clueless pals while avoiding his alcoholic mother (Catherine O’Hara) and idiot slob of a brother (Jack Black). After discovering the work of a noted author, Shaun decides he wants to be a writer. He hammers out an autobiographical novella (called Orange County, naturally) and applies to Stanford, where the aforementioned noted author is a professor. But he’s rejected, thanks to a clerical error by his bumbling high-school counsellor (Lily Tomlin, still doing Ernestine after all these years). With help from his extra-nice girlfriend (Schuyler Fisk, daughter of Sissy Spacek), Shaun goes to increasingly desperate and ill-advised lengths to secure his future and get out of Orange County.
What makes the film so likeable is an almost complete lack of the glossy magazine-ready faces and humourless gross-out sight gags that pollute so many teen flicks. Writer Mike White and director Jake Kasdan (son of Lawrence) both worked on the TV series Freaks and Geeks, a strong show rightly praised by critics for using unglamorous actors to play its nerdy characters. Clearly, they’re after the same feel in this film. Hanks is a spindly pencil-neck with a head too big for his body and teeth too big for his mouth; Fisk has inherited her mom’s freckle-faced, pretty-but-plain looks. It doesn’t necessarily make the plot any more realistic, but it’s refreshing to see two leads who aren’t paragons of flawless youthful beauty.
Then there’s Jack Black, who takes an enjoyably perverse pleasure in displaying his stumpy legs and hairy barrel gut as he parades around in white jockeys. Other than a tame urine-sample gag, he’s the only gross-out humour on hand. In this film, at least, he looks like the true heir apparent to John Belushi.
The literary references show up mainly in the ending, along with a well-known actor who makes a cameo appearance as Shaun’s writer idol. (It’s one of several cameos that happen throughout the film.) Orange County may fall short of Joyce as a portrait of the artist as a young man, but as a teen comedy it’s just fine.
(2.5/4)