Tribeca Film Festival 2023: THE LINE

Fraternities are, as Americans well know by now, often hotbeds of misogyny, homophobia and death for young men. The Line renders this fact with a mixture of white hot stress and gallows humor that captures the insidious paradoxes inherent in the phrase-cum-threat “boys will be boys”: The same guys who spend their afternoons grabbing their crotches in synchronized rhythm to “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” will just as quickly turn around and get somebody killed in the name of “brotherhood.” Freshman director Ethan Berger‘s take on the now-familiar story of frat boys gone bad (worse?) focuses on this particular kind of interpersonal violence, painting a painful picture of the systemic ways fraternity culture can turn even ostensibly “good boys” into monsters. 

Sorry for Party Rocking

The film, set in 2014, follows an upper middle class sophomore, Tom (Alex Wolff, Hereditary), a brother in the fictional Kappa Nu Alpha fraternity who’s a little worried about his future. Appearances are everything to Tom. He’s from Florida and puts on an unnatural, wildly fluctuating Southern accent to fit in with his Good Old Boy brothers and lies about prestigious summer internships, desperately hoping the other shoe won’t drop. As rush season heats up, his uncouth nepo baby roommate, Mitch (Bo Mitchell, Kobra Kai), gets into a feud with Gettys (Austin Abrams, Euphoria, The Walking Dead) a hotshot pledge whose money, looks, and connections all but guarantee him a higher spot in the pecking order than Mitch will ever hope to reach. Caught in the middle, Tom has to decide what matters more, his friendship and integrity or his own little piece of the pie. Emphasizing the toxic, hierarchical class dynamics that undergird the fraternity system adds a new dimension to this narrative, often reduced in our minds to a more generic sense of pack mentality (not that the metaphor isn’t used here immediately, and hey, fair enough).

The ensemble is superb, particularly Wolff and Lewis Pullman (Top Gun: Maverick) as Todd, the frat’s Machiavellian supreme leader who recommends the speech from Gladiator as the best form of prep for public speaking. Shot in a hostile combination of forbiddingly sterile wides and sweaty handheld close-ups, the boys drink and snort their way through the semester, all while donning ironed button-downs to talk about “responsibility” and “tradition.” Sometimes, a good old-fashioned skewering is all you need. The film is good at what it’s doing, reveling in the blue antics it also clearly reviles. It’s well-paced and funny while still being squirm-in-your-seat tense whenever the guys get together (“Blue (Da Ba Dee)” is this movie’s Jaws theme and… oh god). 

Bros Before Hoes?

But then, there’s the B-plot. Tom, we’re told ten ways to Sunday, is a really, really good guy deep down. To prove it, they give him a light romance with Annabelle (Halle Bailey, The Little Mermaid), a Black girl who – woe unto the Party Gods! – wears sweaters and watches Gaspar Noé films, takes notes in class and goes to “wine and cheese nights.” The Boys are not pleased. Tom rushes to her defense. To Berger‘s credit, very direct and obvious work is done to avoid the potential sexism of this “I can fix him” plot (though why Annabelle would deign to spend time with a guy who wears wraparound shades on a string at all is beyond me – no this film doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test).

The two actors also have great chemistry. Yet the presence of this plot in the first place ultimately does more to highlight a seemingly glaring absence in the narrative: Rape culture. These boys talk about women, often degradingly, but never, ever touch them. Besides porny dorm room posters, they’re hardly featured at all. Perhaps the filmmaking team thought that including the endlessly documented ubiquity of violence against women in Greek Life would detract from their central points about classism and how the system degrades men. Before Annabelle was introduced, I actually thought this deliberate absence of women was a novel and interesting strategy to concentrate on these particular facets of the broader system. But once a female character, and especially once consensual sex, is brought into the picture, more work just needs to be done. Strategic or not, this middle-ground feels less like a choice and more like a copout.

Conclusion

These issues aside, The Line is a well-oiled stress machine and brutally funny in its portrait of KNA as a den of vipers and its depiction of this pervasive, casually cruel facet of college life is tinged with brutal, poignant ironies. In a rush interview with a group of pledges, Tom asks one of the boys why he wants to be in a fraternity. He leans back and smiles: “Life’s too short to hang out with a bunch of f*cking losers.” Tragically, the joke is very much on him. 

Watch The Line