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. 

Labor Day

LABOR DAY              B                     

USA  (111 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Jason Reitman          Official site [Brazil]

While this is just an old-fashioned romance, told in the mythic Hollywood style where the prince in shining armor arrives on horseback and slays all the dragons, rescuing the fair maiden and earning her heart in the process, it does retain a certain fantasy element, where one finds this hard to believe, yet there’s also something oddly compelling about it.  Based on Joyce Maynard’s 2009 novel, the same author that wrote the source material for Gus van Sant’s dark satire To Die For (1995), this is another film with a major woman’s role, this time starring Kate Winslet as a divorced mother Adele suffering from severe depression (including signs of agoraphobia), as she’s afraid to leave the safety of her home, rarely ever leaving the house.  Compensating for her fears and anxieties is her 13-year old son Henry (Gattlin Griffith), who recognizes her loneliness, understanding that she never recovered from having her heart stolen from her when her husband left, “I don’t think losing my father broke my mother’s heart, but, rather, losing love itself,” so he willingly looks after his mom, taking care of her as much as he can, and runs all the household errands for her.  While the book is set in New Hampshire, the film was shot in various small towns in Massachusetts that convincingly retain the period look of 1987.  In the opening sequence, the camera glides through a seemingly neverending canopy of trees as we move further away from the posh suburbs out into the tree-lined street of a rural small town, where, interestingly, another actor is narrating the first person voiceover of Henry, the recognizable Tobey Maguire, who doesn’t figure into the film until the final ten minutes, seen as an older adult version of Henry, where many of his earlier thoughts read like a personal memoir.  Despite the high wattage star of Winslet as his mother, this relatively unknown kid carries the picture on his shoulder, as it’s all seen through his eyes.     

Persuading his mother to leave the house, the two spend the first day of the last weekend of summer together stocking up on needed school supplies, when Henry is pulled aside by a bleeding stranger, Frank (Josh Brolin), indicating he needs some help, and somehow manages to talk the two of them into allowing him to come home with them, placing his arm menacingly around Henry and telling Adele, “Frankly, this needs to happen.”  By the time they get home to sort things out, he tells them he’s an escaped prisoner, that he jumped out of a 2nd story hospital window while recovering from an appendectomy operation.  Promising to be out in the morning, hoping to catch a ride on a freight train, hearing a whistle off in the distance, the underlying tension is established in silence, where part of the unique power of the film is its wordless quality, and what little dialogue we hear is essential, while the rest is captured in a kind of quiet intrigue.  These harrowing moments are unsettling, as he’s inclined to tie them up, where this act of making Adele a prisoner in her own home is ironic considering psychologically speaking she’s already a prisoner.  The look of helplessness and fear on her face is palpable, but her concern is for Henry, so Frank reassures her, ”I’ve never intentionally hurt anyone in my life.”  The television news reports, however, suggest he’s been serving 18 years for murder and the police warn the public he could be armed and dangerous.  Instead he goes on a wordless montage of fixing things up around the house, one after another, and even cooks up something to eat, where he spoonfeeds Adele bite by bite, while at the same time the director serves the audience brief flashbacks of Frank’s past, where we’re able to see what landed Frank in jail.  Certainly one recurring parallel between Frank and Adele are their mutual thoughts of regret and sadness, where perhaps they’ve both been living their whole lives containing these haunting feelings of sorrow and loss.    

Frank’s ease around the house, instantly making himself helpful, becoming the man that’s missing for both of them, feels too good to be true, where neither Henry nor his mom want him to go, urging him to stay just a bit longer for his wounds to heal, but the other side of the coin is they both have to hide his presence from the rest of the world, where occasional contact with actual people send them into anxiety mode.  Henry is at an age where every girl is a godsend, and one literally falls into his lap, Mandy (Maika Monroe), an outsider teen who’s been badly scarred from her parent’s trauma-inflicting divorce, believing adults routinely get rid of kids to do what they want, which is have sex.  And while she’s busy describing the teenage apocalyptic philosophy of doom, which makes perfect sense to her, Frank and Adele are thinking about making a run for the border (like Bonnie and Clyde, according to Mandy), escaping to Canada where they can start a new life.  But as events fall into place, one of more more telling scenes happens when Henry spends Sunday with his Dad (Clark Gregg) and extended family, taking place at a Friendly’s family restaurant, which is an embarrassing depiction of what “normal” looks like in America, where adults are overly patronizing, to the point of being nauseating, while the kids are bored silly.  This brief encounter hovers like a cloud of soot and smog over Henry’s horizon, as this is the life he could be leading, and instead he’s got Bonnie and Clyde, where the love-starved Frank and Adele become infatuated, bringing Adele out of her funk, where taking a chance on Frank is dangerous, but he’s attentive to Henry, becoming a poignant coming-of-age story while also showing the great risks involved in romance.  While there’s a bit of schmaltz involved in the ending, the novelist Joyce Maynard once experienced an intense exchange of a flurry of letters in a relationship with a convicted murderer, suggesting ordinary people can be driven by impulsive decisions and reckless behavior, and that sometimes one must make a leap of faith to find love.    

Young Adult

YOUNG ADULT                    C                    

USA  (94 mi)  2011  d:  Jason Reitman                         Official site

Oh where, Oh where has Charlize Theron gone?  Since winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in MONSTER (2003), she has all but dropped off the face of the earth, barely seen since then, working in such low profile films that many haven’t seen her at all since then.  She is back in a role that is pretty much written around her part, aka:  confessions of a psycho bitch from Diablo Cody, who is attempting to glean untold truths from the safe and secure mediocrity of the heartland.  Theron as Mavis is on the rebound after her failed marriage, one of the few who left her small town of Mercury, Minnesota to make it in the urban metropolis of Minneapolis, affectionately known as the Mini Apple, a place that few in Mercury ever see.  Mavis is the author of teen stories that are no longer in vogue, yet she’s busily typing away on her computer trying to complete the series, which is a running narrative throughout the film which mirrors the real life issues surrounding Mavis.  This is largely an opportunity lost, as the book characters offer no fresh insight into real life, but remains lost in a superficial wish fulfillment haze of self-centeredness that defines Mavis’s own world.  And therein lies the real problem with this film, as it’s stuck in a vacuous emptiness from which it rarely escapes.  Post divorce, Mavis is on a mission, to return to her hometown and reclaim her high school boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson), even though he’s happily married with a newborn.  She makes this clear while throwing down tequila chasers in a bar one night, confessing her plan to a guy she went to high school with, Matt (Patton Oswalt), perhaps the most refreshing character in the film, seen as a loser in high school, a guy whose locker was next to hers but she never gave him a second look as she was a high school beauty queen that rarely thought of anyone except herself.  Nothing has changed in that department, while others around her have matured and become more responsible citizens, which she ridicules endlessly as a town full of losers. 

Mavis’s answer to everything is to fill herself full of liquor, which she does pretty much every day, falling face first into her bed at night without ever crawling under the covers.  Like Reese Witherspoon in LEGALLY BLONDE (2001), she has a tiny dog that you can carry around in the palm of your hand that she all but ignores.  Matt becomes her regular drinking buddy, where he conveniently has a homemade whisky still in his garage and the two commiserate about his loser life in high school and her narcissistic intentions with a married man that seem wacko.  The excessive amount of liquor consumption is a fairly standard device in the movies these days, which doesn’t seem to find alcoholism the least bit offensive or obnoxious, treating it as an opportunity for the characters to get more chummy and honest.  In Matt’s case, this may be true, as he’s strictly a side character whose role becomes more relevant due to his genuine earnestness, while Mavis never for a single moment stops thinking of herself, like a smug and pampered rich bitch that treats everyone around her like crap, thinking their lives are little more than boring and miserable, where their freedom is typically hampered by having annoying babies.  Her plan is to swoop in and rescue Buddy from this dreaded fate, knowing he would drop everything to run away with her.  This is a strange take on the American Dream, which Mavis has appropriated as doing whatever she wants at everyone else’s expense.           

While there are a few comical gestures, mostly in the exaggerated MEAN GIRL (2004) cruelty of Mavis’s derision of others, spoken mostly when drunk, as if this actually opens up possibilities for speaking candidly, but most may be surprised at how quietly unfunny this film actually is, as it’s more awkward and uncomfortable than funny, like watching a train wreck waiting to happen.  Had there been more revelations, one can endure plenty of uncomfortable moments, but this film is as vacuous as it seems, where the empty-headed character who spends all her time accessorizing with manicures and pedicures and buying new clothes for herself really never gets below the surface, as she’s pretty much the same vain egotist she was in high school, where her good looks have allowed her to get away with anything.  The way she stuffs herself with junk food and candy, not to mention plenty of alcohol, it’s a stretch to believe she never gains any weight.  But this is Charlize Theron we’re talking about, who dons several different flirtatious and beguiling looks and still looks terrific when hung over in the morning.  All in all, little happens, little is learned, and little changes, where the movie is basically a window into small town America as seen through the eyes of an overly pampered Barbie doll with a love for booze and spewing venom about the wretched and miserable lives of others, all the while blind to how pathetic her own miserable life has become.  She is a perennial user, a blood sucker, a parasite, the kind of girl who survives by manipulating others to get what she wants.  In the end all we can ask is so what?  Why should we care?