A More Perfect Union

A More Perfect Union plays like a movie about a bunch of guys in college made by a bunch of guys in college -- it's a little rough around the edges, to say the least. (The movie was shot here in Austin and had its world premiere in March at the SXSW Film Festival where it garnered some of the event's biggest crowds. Word just received from the producer tells us that A More Perfect Union has been trimmed to 100 minutes from the original time on the screening tape that was the source for this review that was originally published on March 24, 1995.) Actually, the four guys in the movie are recent college graduates and roommates who inexplicably decide to found a new country -- a one nation under Budweiser, so to speak -- in tune with their twentysomething perspective. The lofty principles of this nation's new government, the congress of which meets in the unkempt living room of the “founding fathers,” include getting the landlord to install a basketball net and exacting vengeance upon high school gym teachers for past humiliations, among other things. The joke is that, in contrast to the radical youth of the Sixties, this is the X Generation's idea of a revolution. The comic and political ideas in A More Perfect Union never quite gel, however, and so what you're left with is something as anarchic in its execution as the new, fledgling country at its center. What this movie needs, if you'll forgive the pun, is a stronger constitution.