OVER THE EDGE

d. Jonathan Kaplan (1979)

New Granada in Colorado is a planned community, an isolated new town full of vacant lots and half-built condos. The adults have moved there from bigger cities to give themselves and their children a better chance in life but, in fact, the environment is sterile, stifling and obsessed with rules and money. The biggest problem in the town is juvenile delinquency, or, more correctly, the juveniles themselves. With nowhere to go and nothing to do the kids, inevitably, make their own entertainment, much to the chagrin of the adults who believe they should be not seen, not heard and certainly not high.

The kids are drowning in boredom, and obsessed with drugs, drink, sex and vandalism. The cast are all so young and wholesome looking, it’s actually quite shocking to see a 12 year old boy swigging from a bottle of scotch, and both comic and disturbing to see the same boy at school flunking a test on Hieronymus Bosch (of all things) because the speed he thought he had taken is actually LSD. The parents are either preoccupied or don’t care, and the authorities are positively draconian: they don’t even want the kids to have a recreation center, and the Chief of Police is a blowhard and a fascist.

Bubbling tensions boil over after one of the boys is shot and killed by the cops during a prank, and the kids strike back: locking the adults into the school where they are attending a meeting about the delinquency problem and how it is affecting property prices. From 1933's Zero de Conduite onwards, there’s something very pleasing and cinematic about watching children getting their own back, and here the disaffected youths have a jamboree of destruction, channeling their frustration and excess testosterone and estrogen into trashing the library, flooding the gym, taunting their parents over the pa system and setting fire to vehicles in the car park. They know that at least some of them will get caught and sent to The Hill, the local juvenile correction centre, but they no longer care: so desperate for a change that even prison seems like a holiday. 

The edge the kids tumble over is clearly a threshold: geographically, mentally, morally. There are a number of beautiful shots of characters walking towards to the horizon, usually in the sun streaked light of evening or early morning. There may be an implication that there is potentially something better over the ridge, but we know there’s just more of the same. The town itself is plonked in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mud, an island suburb, a prison. These scenes are accompanied by a Debussy-esque Sol Kaplan score, also used to great effect when one protagonist Carl is beaten up by two older boys to ensure he doesn’t snitch on them for shooting at a police car with a bb gun.

Often reminiscent of a more suburban Badlands, the film presents the vast mid-west as a place of stasis where the quest for excitement and movement often leads to crime, and where love and pleasure is fraught with danger, tied up with transgression. The script was co-written by Tim Hunter, who would later direct his own masterpiece of teen angst Rivers Edge (1987) and work on both the original Twin Peaks series and the marvelous Eerie, Indiana. 

Poorly distributed and rarely revisited, Over the Edge is now best known as the film debut of the handsome but gormless Matt Dillon, who was trying to sneak out of class when he was spotted by the film’s visiting casting director, a big break that he must still be pinching himself about. Ironically, the 15 year old Dillon is perhaps the least accomplished actor amongst the film’s excellent young cast, but he does look the part, and, in Hollywood, that’s over half the battle.