Around The Fire

Around the Fire
USA, 1998; 107 minutes
Director: John Jacobsen
Screenplay: Tommy Rosen, John Comerford
Cast: Devon Sawa, Eric Mabius, Tara Reid

Reviewed by:
Matt Mullins
Wisconsin State Journal

"Around The Fire" tackles complexity of drug use by Matt Mullins

High school dramas prove a desolate landscape for film. The last one I can recall that (mostly) took its audience seriously was "Pump up the Volume" in 1990.

"Around The Fire" ends this drought, and so deserves a wider-ranging audience than viewers in their late teens.

The film tells of Simon (Devon Sawa), a high school senior grappling with a cool atmosphere at home. Simon resents his father and dislikes his stepmother, who he believes had an affair with his father before his mother's death.

Simon's father, Matt (Bill Smitrovich), sends him off to a college-prep boarding school, where Simon finds marijuana and LSD and begins hanging out with Grateful Dead followers.

Naturally, drugs provide the hot-button issue in the film, the one likely to draw some ire from distraught parents. That it occurs within the context of family communication issues and emotional safety, however, lends the seductions of drugs an ambiguity well-warranted. This is no "Just say no" film. But it's no hemp activist film, either. The drug culture shows an underbelly here, leading to despair and detox. Yet drug use is also celebrated for its exploratory joy. The film simply stakes out a position that acid and pot can work in different ways for different people, and not all these ways are good or productive.

But though such experimentation here is hardly glamorous, neither is it gritty. This isn't "Trainspotting" by a long stretch; it isn't about the socioeconomically disenfranchised.

Resolutions come fairly easily in emotional outbursts and quiet reconciliations.

Some of these are played with a sure hand, as when in group therapy the emotionally defensive Matt speaks to the guidance counselor more than to his son. Other such scenes feel forced.

When Simon's girlfriend Jennifer (Tara Reid) asks Simon "What is your problem?" after an outburst at Simon's home, it feels as if the situation has been pulled from an after-school special. A bully in the showers and a reproach for dealing by a friend carry a similar artificiality.

But the overall spirit of ambivalence on issues of drugs, and the sensitive treatment of Simon's emotional issues, prove the salient characteristics of this film.

Simon makes progress with his father, and finishes detox, but issues with drugs and family hardly seem finished for him.

In the end, then, the film feels realistic, offering a complex perspective on experimentation and familial communication and cooperation.

It is that rare and welcome film, a high school drama that feels mature.