Joe's Movie Reviews

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Lymelife

It's the early 1980's on Long Island. A slowly disintegrating family is trying to hold it together while each of their individual lives is coming apart. Dad has long since lost any emotional connection with mom and is having an affair with the wife of the family's next door neighbor, whose husband is gradually losing any kind of connection with life in general due to his suffering from Lyme disease. The youngest son is attempting to make up for his lack of connection with his family by forging his first serious relationship, and not having much luck. And the older son, in the military, is about to ship out to the Falkland islands. Meanwhile, mom gets obsessed with the rising danger of Lyme disease to an absurd degree (but at least it allows her to concentrate on something other than the desperate state of her family).

Plenty of material there for a movie, that's for sure. Actually, there's plenty of material for a lengthy novel. But the makers of "Lymelife" seem to be a bit daunted by trying to cram all of that into a mere 95 minutes (why such a short film?), and wind up giving us some isolated moments of real creativity and good, solid performances, surrounded by an ocean of cliche and stereotypes, and actors who seem throughly unenthusiastic about the roles they're playing.

Over the past 4 years or so, Alec Baldwin has made an increasing "side" career in small, independent films dealing with disintegrating families, inevitably playing the cold, selfish father who can't see what he's doing to cause his family's drifting even further apart. He can almost play this role in his sleep by now, and in this film he nearly does. The one slightly new development here is that the character is openly racist, spewing his nonsense against Arabs, black people and numerous others... but that's hardly enough to make the character really stand out (or seem real). Baldwin can certainly do great work with a good script, but he doesn't much help here in that department (he's a more interesting heel on "30 Rock").

Jill Hennessey as his neglected wife isn't given much to do except continually cover every object and person in sight with duct tape, which she somehow seems to believe is going to protect them against Lyme disease. It isn't funny the FIRST time she does it, and it becomes increasing less funny each succeeding time. Rory Culkin (one of Mcauly Culkin's brothers) as the youngest son is a bland, character-free lump of teen angst, and Emma Roberts, up until now mostly seen in cutesy teen fare like "Nancy Drew" and "Hotel For Dogs" definitely plays a more adult-style part here but doesn't play it with any more depth... she's like a valley-girl cheerleader who somehow wound up in Long Island. And Cynthia Nixon as the neighbor with whom Baldwin is carrying on an affair plays the role as such a complete bimbo that it's offensive to men AS WELL AS women.

In addition to the weak acting, we have a script that constantly beats us over the head with symbolism and metaphor. Once in a while it works, but mostly it's so obvious as to be almost painful, such as the moment in which mom and her two sons have been abandoned by dad with some lame excuse (he's really with his mistress), and the incomplete family sits down for dinner and says grace directly underneath a picture of the last supper. In case you don't get it, the camera really lingers. Okay, okay, I understand already... this shattered and incomplete family in the same frame as the last supper. Very profound. (And why was the film set in the early
1980's? Except for a few news reports about the Iran Hostage crisis and the Falkland Islands war, the time is rarely mentioned or taken advantage of. The story could just as well have been contemporary.

But didn't I say something earlier about there being a few moments of creativity and good, solid performances? Why, yes I did. Thank you very much for reminding me. Kieran Culkin as the older son is remarkably good in creating a living, breathing person instead of a stereotype. His hard-edged military man slowly reveals multiple layers of emotion and character that probably weren't on the page, and his becomes a genuinely touching sub-plot as he tries to hold the family together. And Oscar winner Timothy Hutton as the neighbor with Lyme disease benefits from one of the film's few effective bits of symbolism: it's clear that what happens to Hutton physically is exactly what's happening to everyone else emotionally. But Hutton deserves much of the credit himself: he makes you feel his pain (both mental and physical pain) but also demonstrates a remarkable sense of humor in the midst of his health crisis that gives the movie its relatively few genuinely deserved laughs.

But overall "Lymelife" is an overly obvious "expose" of something that's been exposed already so many times that it's only a secret or surprise to someone who's been living in a cave far away from civilization: many of our apparently happiest families hide dark secrets and emotional pain beneath their veneer of happiness, and the "golden" suburbs are often not so golden. "American Beauty", "Revolutionary Road", and on and on... they've all been here before. And apart from Kieran Culkin and Timothy Hutton, "Lymelife" is another case of deja vu all over again.

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