In case you haven’t been listening to what prestige and art-house films have been blaring, the suburbs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The carefree contentment projected by all those white-picket-fence homes, and the smiling cheer of all those good-looking people in their nice clothes and fancy cars? It’s all lies, joyful facades that mask serious social dysfunction. Despite seeming like the place where happily-ever-afters come true, the suburbs are in reality hotbeds of familial discord, of tumultuous adolescent anger and misery, and of deception, greed, selfishness and alienation. If you thought that moving there from the vile, corrupting city was smart, think again. Relocating to a comfy home, and mingling with your undoubtedly Yuppie neighbors, will only warp you into a desolate conformist zombie like those seen in American Beauty, The Ice Storm and countless other likeminded dramas. And desperately running through the streets like Leonardo DiCaprio’s wretched Revolutionary Road hubby, or performing fatal makeshift abortions on yourself like Kate Winslet’s hopeless wife, are your only avenues of escape!
Excuse the sarcasm, but seriously – does anyone still find this gibberish relevant? Pulling the curtains back on picture-perfect suburbia is such a stale, clichéd modus operandi that it’s long ceased to be of any use. And one suspects that the reason so many recent films address this topic from the detached confines of an earlier era (anywhere from the ‘50s to ‘80s) is because only in the past would characters actually view as revelatory the fact that non-city-living isn’t a surefire blissful existence. Which brings us around to Lymelife, a late-‘70s-set tale about screwed-up Long Island high-schooler Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin), whose crumbling family includes cold, philandering real-estate developer dad Mickey (Alec Baldwin), military brother Jimmy (Kieran Culkin), and gloomy, quietly suffering mom Brenda (Jill Hennessy). His life a checklist of movie clichés about adolescence, Scott is picked on by the local bully, loves Star Wars, and pines for his pretty older neighbor Adrianna (Emma Roberts), who flirts with and teases him. Also in the mix are Adrianna’s crazy parents: mom Melissa (Cynthia Nixon) is an adulteress sleeping with Mickey, and her dad Charlie (Timothy Hutton) is a mess of a man who, instead of looking for work, smokes pot in his basement, his deterioration ostensibly instigated by a case of lime disease.
I say ostensibly because Charlie – like everyone else in Derick Martini’s film (co-written with brother Steven) – is really suffering from suburbanitis, that stultifying malady in which moving to the ‘burbs not only doesn’t solve, but in fact amplifies, barely suppressed problems. Lymelife shows directorial restraint in depicting Scott’s confused headspace, and its performances are universally solid, with both Rory Culkin and Hennessey conveying a tempered soulfulness that helps prevent their characters from succumbing to cartoonishness. Yet the narrative they’re assigned to breathe life into is irrevocably moldy, a portrait of father-son and husband-wife strife, as well as of budding teenage sexuality and maturity, that’s defined by groaningly bittersweet, paradise-is-an-illusion shots of middle-class homes spied out of school bus windows. Apparently semi-autobiographical, Lymelife sporadically nails sharp (if familiar) details, for example a shirtless Scott rehearsing how to be cool and macho while staring into his mirror, or Scott and Adrianna’s awkward maiden sexual experiences. Too bad, then, that such authenticity is drowned out by an overarching don’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover message that long ago lost its luster.
