The Skeleton Twins

THE SKELETON TWINS        C+            
USA  (93 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Craig Johnson            Official site

One of the more acclaimed films to come out of Sundance, winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, yet despite the darkness of the subject matter, suicide turned into a morbid comedy, the film is surprisingly conventional.  While this was an opportunity to create something uniquely original, instead it’s more than slightly contrived, filled with movie cliché’s and a truly terrible musical soundtrack that just screams of indie light with a peppy beat, feeling nearly identical to the musical track used in Jason Reitman’s UP IN THE AIR (2009), in both cases used to add a surge of folksy energy to an otherwise downbeat subject, but the music couldn’t feel more generic.  Certainly that’s part of the problem, but the story itself also has a condescending air about it in the derisive and mocking style of humor used, where everybody else is fair game to be made fun of, calling kids of today “little shits,” while in the same breath making a film about two bratty grown up children who both feel unloved and unlovable, where many of the viewers will sympathize, even as these shortsighted characters don’t really give a damn about anybody else.  Much like Bud Cort’s stream of comic suicide attempts in HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971) or Lone Scherfig’s offbeat WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF (2002), there’s a fine line between tragedy and comedy, where the better films err on the side of tragedy, while the more mainstream films err on the side of comedy, which is the case here, as the comedic aspects are delightfully entertaining, though resembling the absurdist tone of comic sketches, while the more tragic, downbeat moments never really work, likely due to the fact that the lives of the two lead characters feel more like fragments and are never truly explored.  The viewer only sees what the writer wants them to see, where there isn’t an underlying reservoir of hidden, untapped emotions, which is the essential component on display throughout the nearly three-hour The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them (2014). 

Bought up at Sundance and distributed by the Duplass brothers, the story concerns a twin brother and sister, Milo (Bill Hader) and Maggie (Kristen Wiig, though originally the part was conceived with Ana Faris in mind), both alums from the Saturday Night Live (1975 – present) television series and both the product of a dysfunctional family.  While a series of flashbacks briefly explores their childhood, it’s used more for symbolic connections than to provide any real insight, as the focus remains thoroughly targeted on the present, where both are miserably unhappy, and as twins seem to be on the same psychic wavelength, as both are seen at the outset on the verge of committing suicide at exactly the same moment, though they haven’t seen one another in ten years.  Maggie is stopped from taking a handful of pills by an interrupting phone call from an emergency room announcing her brother survived his failed attempt of cutting his wrists in the bathtub.  Flying out ot LA to offer her support, Milo grumbles a spew of sarcastic venom at her and tells her to go away, but she refuses to listen and instead invites him to her small New York hometown where she lives with her husband Lance (Luke Wilson), giving her an opportunity to look after him.  Having no better offers, of course he accepts, but immediately he’s the odd man out, as Lance is a testosterone positive alpha male who is hyper positive about everything, where he acts like he’s perpetually stoned on Zoloft.  Milo, on the other hand, is a sullen, deeply depressive gay man who hides his emotions in self-deprecating sarcasm that is too dark for most people to figure out, leaving him perpetually isolated and alone.  Maggie seems like she’s carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, but feigns happiness, matching the mood of her constantly upbeat husband, thankful that she’s not living with the pathetic losers that describe her earlier life.  Milo, of course, sees through this in a second, but remains totally out of place, as evidenced by his total frustration at going to a gay bar where he keeps waiting for the men to show up, only to learn it’s “dyke night.” 

While Milo is a head case, wearing his troubles on his sleeve, where an even darker side is hinted at, the audience accepts his psychic turmoil, aggravated further by a contentious relationship with a former English teacher, Rich (Ty Burrell), who is nearby that has trouble written all over it.  Meanwhile, Maggie remains cheerful enough, but that smile is quickly wiped off her face when she’s forced to admit some hard truths to her brother, both high on nitrous oxide at the time, so she couldn’t lie her way out of it as she was attempting to do with her husband, where her façade of happiness reveals as much interior dysfunction as Milo, but she’s better at covering it up.  His presence seems to bring out her most protected secrets, which becomes something of a combustible problem that could easily blow up in her face.  It turns out these secrets are doorways to miserable childhoods and unending emotional pain that have been with them their entire lives, which they’ve both on their own unsuccessfully tried to avoid dealing with.  Neither has any social life to speak of, where their lives are a wreck, so being together has a strange way of releasing pent up memories, allowing them to share experiences that only they know about, which is entirely believable, as it’s clear the two of them have a chemistry from working together.  Painful to watch at times, the film attempts to provide a comic perspective on such assorted themes of suicide, the aftereffects of parental suicide, adultery, serial lying, dysfunctional parenting, sexual abuse of a minor, depression, drug use, and even animal cruelty, where it’s kind of a combination plate of social ills.  When their mother (Joanna Gleason) arrives on the scene, what follows is a descent into ever more disturbing territory.  At one of the bleakest points of despair, Milo breaks out into what appears to be a song and dance routine they performed together as kids, lip-synching to Jefferson Starship’s synth-heavy song for the 80’s, Starship - Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now - YouTube (4:32), which couldn’t be more corny, but it’s the moment that seals the deal, as if they have nothing else, they have each other.  While we’ve seen and heard all this before, there are some affecting moments, but overall the film never digs deep enough to actually matter, where the ideas and the performances are eventually lost to the mediocre execution. 

Brewster McCloud

BREWSTER MCCLOUD                   B              
USA  (105 mi)  1970  ‘Scope  d:  Robert Altman

Altman: Your screenplay was a piece of crap!
Cannon: My screenplay was perfect.
Altman: It was crap.
Cannon: You bought it!
Altman: You sold it!

Often listed as the director’s favorite, where Altman is quoted as saying “It was my boldest work, by far my most ambitious,” it was this madcap farce that followed the huge success of MASH (1970), a popular audience favorite, while this film divided audiences with its go-for-the jugular style of humor.   The original Doran William Cannon screenplay, Brewster McCloud’s (Sexy) Flying Machine, passed through all the major studios, becoming one of the legendary unproduced scripts in Hollywood, where even Bob Dylan at one point expressed an interest, but it was dying a slow death until music producer Lou Adler, who produced The Mamas and the Papas, passed it along to Robert Altman.  Altman had his own problems with the script, initially asking Brian McKay, who he had worked with during the 60’s on the TV series Bonanza (1959 – 1973), to revise the script, but Altman hated the script so much that he eventually threw it out, where it became something of a challenge not to use a single word of the original screenplay, relying on improvisation, coaching the actors on lines as they shot the scenes.  Cannon, of course, was outraged when he saw the finished product and disassociated himself with the film, all of which is part of the legendary making of this film.  It was Altman’s idea to use the Houston Astrodome as the principle shooting location, the first film to shoot inside the mammoth structure, but there were clashes on the set where he replaced cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth with Lamar Boren, where he was uncomfortable with leading man Bud Cort, whose very next film would be the quirky black comedy HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971), listed at #9 on AFI's 10 Top 10 of American romantic comedies, and production slowed when Altman was hospitalized with a hernia.  However, typical of Altman’s working methods, he enjoyed hosting informal gatherings with his cast and crew after hours, where marijuana and alcohol were plentiful, making it more of an experience than a typical film shoot, something of a holdover of 60’s counterculture thinking that Altman maintained throughout his lifetime.   

While this was a college campus favorite, perhaps reflective of the anger and cynicism of the era, it may be viewed today as a raw and unpolished film that is often politically incorrect, where Altman early in his career was not afraid to make racial jokes, yet it is this unbridled freedom that expresses what’s best about this director, as he’s not afraid to take chances, where the freewheeling and irreverent tone is the whole point of the film.  The 1970’s was dominated by a New Wave of younger American filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Brian de Palma, and Peter Bogdanovich, all of whom were not only contemporaries, but often colleagues.  Altman was an outsider to this group, characterized as a brash young rebel whose own personal vision was just as comfortable railing against the establishment as the counterculture, much like Cassavetes, both perhaps the decade’s best chroniclers of human behavior.  In BREWSTER however, a parody of conformism and bizarre even by Altman’s standards, an example of his vulgarity, provocatively going beyond conventional taste, targeting bullies, racists, authority, and the wealthy, where we have a less than perfect film that seems to glorify its failings, considered a failure in some critical measure, yet it feels strangely enough like Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), a somewhat overpraised early work, yet a film Hitchcock, and Altman here as well, had to make in order to unleash their artistic potential, as both films contain evidence of the brilliance that is yet to come.  It’s impossible to think of the sprawling mess/masterpiece that is Nashville (1975) without first thinking of this film, where Altman has the luxury of getting the quirks out of his system, where BREWSTER is clearly a trial run for some of the effects that Altman perfects in Nashville.  Both are nearly plotless, set in the South, with a cast of thousands, featuring a kind of American populism in the musical numbers throughout, where P.T. Barnum’s “Greatest Show on Earth” turns into The Grand Ole Opry, where American flags are unfurled to marching bands and the colors of red, white, and blue, and patriotism is stood on its ear.  The spirit of community is celebrated at the end of both films, but only after having undergone a terrible tragedy, the death of the mythical hero, where there’s a lingering feeling of an essential moral lesson yet to be learned, a cynical expression that suggests we are not in touch with the rapid rate at which the world around us is changing. 

This is ostensibly a post-60’s fantasy, a challenge of mainstream convention, the story of a boy, Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort), a likeable misfit living in the bowels of the Houston Astrodome who builds a pair of mechanical wings so that he can fly, presumably to escape from this incomprehensible world.  From the outset, things are not what they seem, where the MGM logo appears, but instead of a lion’s roar, we hear a voice feebly explain, “I forgot the opening line,” whereupon we are taken into a classroom lecture by René Auberjonois pointing out, in minute scientific detail, the various differences and characteristics of certain birds.  Brewster, however, has what appears to be a Guardian Angel (or Angel of Death) known as Louise (Sally Kellerman), an angel who has lost her wings, a somewhat eccentric woman seen dressed in a trench coat who encourages his dreams of flight while apparently strangling anyone that poses a threat to Brewster, while the opening credit sequence inside the Astrodome becomes a parody of the movie structure itself, featuring none other than Margaret Hamilton, aka the Wicked Witch of the West in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), as Miss Daphne Heap attempting to lead a marching band of black musicians and twirlers in her own truly terrible rendition of the national anthem.  But she’s forced to stop and try again, as she berates them to play in the proper key, “I want everything exactly the way it should be.  That’s why you’re in these uniforms.  That’s why I bought you these uniforms!” where the opening credits begin again, but this time the band breaks out into gospel in a completely out of control free-for-all, where they appear to have been struck by a liberating spirit of joy.  Immediately we are introduced to a theme of unrestricted freedom and continued constraint, pointing out the post-60’s tensions inherent with repression and the need to escape it, where at every turn the world appears challenged by the stupidity of the prevailing order, where the viewer quickly realizes they are in for manic silliness in this outlandishly strange black comedy.  Altman has always relished large ensemble casts, where we see him early in his career having a blast with the remnants of Doran William Cannon’s decimated script which contains a zillion wacky characters, somehow orchestrating this mayhem into a wonderful mess of a movie. 

Brewster is an inconspicuous limousine driver for the wretchedly greedy Alexander Wright (Stacy Keach in Scrooge makeup), an elderly man in a wheelchair continually barking out orders as he bullies the residents in several retirement homes for his rent money, literally taking every last dollar.  It’s only a matter of time before his wheelchair flies out of control and we see him barreling down the freeway.  Almost simultaneously, we see the return of Miss Daphne Heap, this time berating a nearby raven perched nearby her cage of pigeons, screaming “Get out, you nigger bird!” before she is struck dead, somehow strangled, seen wearing her ruby red slippers as bird shit drops on her inert corpse.  This kind of racial nastiness is all but absent from films today, but it takes Altman’s darkly satiric notions to perfectly express Miss Daphne’s superficial veneer of racial tolerance covering up the ugly racism lying underneath.  Houston is besieged by a string of unsolved stranglings, calling in an out of town police expert, “San Francisco super cop” Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy wearing blue contact lenses to resemble Steve McQueen) to investigate.  Shaft immediately fixates on the bird droppings, linking the murders to Brewster.  In Brewster’s underground lair, where he has stolen a Nikon camera as well as a historical museum book on the Wright Brothers to help him develop his mechanical wings, he is visited by Hope (Jennifer Salt), a young girl who is a health food nut that has a nearly fetishist thing for him, but he ignores her and instead develops a friendship with the kooky and dimwitted Astrodome tour guide Suzanne, Shelley Duvall, who got her start in this film, with the world’s largest eyelashes.  Suzanne confidently slips on the gloves and turns into a daffy wannabe race car driver of a Plymouth Road Runner who helps him escape from Shaft, as well as the police, in a riveting car chase scene parodying BULLITT (1968), though in truth looking back from today, it’s much closer to the SMOKY AND THE BANDIT (1977) chase scenes.  Shaft’s humiliating exit from the chase, and the film, seems to suggest Altman simply grew tired of the character, so he got rid of him.   

This coming-of-age story surrounding McCloud is accompanied by equally absurd bird lectures from Auberjonois (known only as the Lecturer) that continue throughout the film, always interrupting the flow of action with some ridiculous comment about “man’s similarity to birds, and birds’ similarity to men,” often describing the mating habits (interspersed with Brewster’s own sexual exploits), where eventually it appears the Lecturer himself is slowly transforming into a bird.  While the police are flabbergasted as to why their strangulation victims are covered in bird droppings, Brewster is also trying to finalize the work on his flying machine before the police close in.  While Louise urges against the temptations of the flesh, Brewster thinks he’s found his soul mate in Suzanne, becoming intimately involved, where the sensuous use of music is reminiscent of Hair and other counterculture musicals.  Perhaps the most perfectly realized scene in the entire movie, one that beautifully sits apart from all the chaotic madness, is Louise’s exit, as she not only leaves Brewster once he becomes lovers with Suzanne, but she mysteriously leaves this earthly presence.  Kellerman’s role should remind Altman fans of Virginia Madsen’s part as the presumed Angel of Death in the director’s last film, A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (2006).  Suzanne, however, is not ready to leave her life in Houston behind to run away with the infinitely strange Brewster, who she suspects in the murders, so in no time she betrays him to the police.  For Brewster, it’s now or never, retreating to the Astrodome for his wings as he runs to the bleachers even as the police are arriving on the scene, where, like BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) or THELMA & LOUISE (1991), he has little choice but to take flight.  Unlike Disney’s DUMBO (1941), however, this one has a more ill-fated ending, where even as he initially soars through the air, he cannot escape the bizarre claims of the Lecturer that man is inherently unsuitable for flight, eventually growing exhausted and crumbling in a heap on the floor of the Astrodome as a three-ring Circus of the cast now returning as costumed clowns and circus performers march around oblivious to Brewster’s remains.