THE HOUSE OF
YES
B+
USA (90 mi) 1997 d: Mark Waters
A wacky, outrageously acerbic black comedy with Genevieve
Bujold as the matriarch over an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, uttering
lines like “conversation only leads to trouble,” adapted from Wendy MacLeod’s
play We Are Living in a House of Yes,
though perhaps loosely based upon Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, as
this is basically a Gothic haunted house story, where all the inhabitants are
forever tainted by family secrets, not the least of which includes ongoing
incestual relations between a twin brother Marty (Josh Hamilton) and his sister
Jackie (Parker Posey) playing JFK and Jackie-O, both obsessed with the Kennedy
family since their father walked out on the day of JFK's assassination, where
their mother reminds us “Jackie was holding Marty's penis when they came out of
the womb. The doctors swore to me it’s in some medical journal
somewhere.” The brilliant Parker Posey shines in her role as the recently
de-institutionalized, still mentally unstable sister who becomes completely
obsessed as Jackie-O, right down to wearing a string of pearls around her neck,
the pink Chanel suit along with the pillbox hat that the First Lady was wearing
when JFK was shot and killed in Dallas. Played by a younger actress
(Rachael Leigh Cook) as Jackie at age 14, the film opens with iconic,
interchangeable images The
House of Yes - Young Jackie-O Tour Videos. - YouTube (4:57) over the
opening credits of Jackie-O (in color) showing off her stately home and the
real Jacquelyn Kennedy (in Black and White) leading a televised guided tour of
the White House A Tour of
the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy - YouTube (57:37), which aired on CBS to
enormous TV ratings on February 14, 1962, though here it resembles
parody. The film makes no bones about its air of pretension, becoming a
savagely dark, dialogue-laced, screwball comedy where Posey literally steals
the show, as the audience can’t take their eyes off her every moment she’s
onscreen, as she’s utterly captivating in a delightfully sick and macabre kind
of way, perhaps the defining role of her career.
The terrific, sarcastically biting dialogue intermixes
overdramatic yet stinging remarks with a weird hilarity, maintaining a frenetic
pace over the course of 24 hours on a dark and stormy Thanksgiving Day, where a
torrent of rain sets the tone for interior, claustrophobic fun and games,
especially when the power goes off and the darkness is lit only by candlelight,
luminously shot by Michael Stiller. The characters themselves couldn’t be
more memorable, as the acting is outstanding, each playing off the other with
surprising skill, where there is more quotable dialogue here than virtually any
other film of its era, a movie that plays well to repeated viewings, set in
1983 in an enormously empty Virginian mansion during the Reagan years, a last
gasp of aristocracy where the world of privilege is a given, as they know no
other way, a place with no rules, where Jackie is defined as a person who can’t
take no for an answer, where the film title came from bathroom wall graffiti
seen by the director: “We are living in a house of yes.” According
to her mother, if there’s anything she knows and understands, it’s that “Jackie
and Marty belong to each other.” So when Marty arrives home from college
with his fiancée Lesly (Tori Spelling), her presence sends the house into
turmoil, as they’ve never had a guest before, wonderfully expressed in a flurry
of Marx Brothers style dialogue seen here: House of Yes - YouTube
(1:49). Other than Marty, the inhabitants, including the ever inquisitive
younger brother Anthony (Freddie Prinze Jr.), are all shut-ins who rarely if
ever venture to the outside world, preferring the comforts of home, where like
Poe’s story, the house itself seems filled with the secret mysteries of its own
family history, where nothing normal ever happens, perhaps best expressed by
the mother who brazenly tells her children “I look at you people and wonder,
how did you ever fit in my womb?”
Posey’s manic edge couldn’t be more brilliantly original,
but Bujold is the anchor of the family, where the two get all the best lines,
where Bujold’s understatement perfectly contrasts with Posey’s frenetic
energy. The question is whether any of the family’s secrets will be revealed,
whether Marty will be allowed to run away with the perfectly ordinary Lesly and
lead some semblance of a normal life, or whether the house of horrors will
somehow manage to take its toll on the inhabitants. Jackie is always
walking on eggshells, reminiscent of the outrageous and highly exaggerated
restraint required in Guy Maddin’s CAREFUL (1992), where people speak in
whispers lest they be overcome by a looming avalanche, where anything can
potentially trigger her violent tendencies, where the quick and abrupt mood
changes are startlingly effective, always matched by the music of Rolfe Kent,
beautifully expressed in a scene where Marty and Lesly play chopsticks on the
piano together, until Jackie butts in and the brother and sister team play an
astoundingly difficult four-hand piano concerto that immediately drives Lesly
out of the picture, eventually breaking into free form jazz that opens the door
to a few family secrets: The House of Yes --- Big Reveal
--- SPOILERS - YouTube (3:51). While the emotions displayed
onscreen are surprisingly real, never resorting to the artificiality of camp,
this is a film about revealing emotional truths, however twisted they may be,
like jealousy, love, shame, obsession, humiliation, disbelief, or
possessiveness, where the non-naturalistic manner in which they’re expressed is
part of the film’s free-wheeling charm, as this allows Parker’s wonderfully
over-the-top performance, “But I’m not crazy now, I’m better. I watch
soap operas, I bake brownies, normalcy is coursing through my veins,” but also
lends itself to the unthinkable, such as Marty and Jackie-O lovingly reenacting
the Kennedy assassination as foreplay. This is a surprisingly demented
American version of THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), lured by indulgence and the
self-centered spell of the Me Generation, thinking the love you want to believe
in is strong enough to lift you outside societal norms, not just above
conventionality, but also morality, where in fact anything goes. To get
lost in this delusional rhapsodic flight is like Icarus flying too
close to the sun.
