They're a feral bunch, pumping themselves up continuously on booze, drugs and rap music before diving into another bout of door-to-door scamming. The rowdy travelling family, under daily pressure when leaving yet another identical motel to make good on the day, without any light at the end of the tunnel, is easy to see as an indictment of employment under faceless corporations, but it's also as much about the shorted-sighted hedonism of youth. It does labour to make its point at more than two and a half hours - some editing would really have helped here - but its avoidance of stereotypical plot turns and characterisations of the people they encounter in nearly every possible case is a huge, refreshing plus. There are no rapes, no drug overdoses, no shoot-outs, not even an arrest for their wayward actions. This is clearly deliberate: the director wishes not just to defy the genre conventions, but to suggest that things can still be fucked up even without obvious dramatic consequences.
It's not Arnold's most perfectly-realised film - you would have to go to the much smaller and more succinct Fish Tank for that - and the sound is a real hindrance, particularly with all the mumbling in accents from all over the States, but it is thought-provoking. The Lord of the Flies allusion at the end is hardly necessary, because if you've paid attention you'll have got that right at the start, but then it also underlines that for all that the lead character might have learned, no real progress for society is within sight.
7/10
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