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| Lester fantasizing about Angela. |
This is a movie about a group of highly dysfunctional people. Mostly over-indulged, self-centered, angry people. There's Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), the narrator, who is unhappy with his life and has become quite unhinged and hostile, and fantasizes about his daughter's underage friend, Angela: "I feel like I've been in a coma for the past twenty years. And I'm just now waking up." Angela is a damaged girl so worried about being "ordinary" that she overcompensates by bragging about nonexistent sexual encounters. There's Lester's wife, Carolyn (Annette Benning), a neurotic, uptight mess, also unhappy with her life, which leads her to an affair with a fellow realtor: "My company sells an image. It's part of my job to live that image." Then there's their daughter, Jane, with body-image issues and parent-loathing issues, who is, you guessed it, also unhappy with her life, and starts dating her bizarre next-door neighbor. They all have lots of anger and misery in spite of their privileged existences. It's hard to feel sorry for them (except maybe for Jane, since her parents are a mess, though she has too much of an attitude to garner much sympathy), because they are in charge of their own lives. They can change things whenever they want (and not in the way that Lester does, becoming volatile and wacky). They can quit their jobs, move, divorce, find happiness. You've been in a coma for 20 years, Lester? Why has it taken you 20 years to figure out you need to change something in your life?
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| "See the way the handle on her pruning shears matches her gardening clogs? That's not an accident." -Lester describing Carolyn. |
The next door neighbors are just as messed-up. Jane's boyfriend, Ricky, is a camera-obsessed drug dealer who thinks he's very profound, filming dead birds and plastic bags and spouting philosophies that probably only sound good if you're actually high on some of his drugs. He's been pretty abused by his regimented, violent father, Frank (Chris Cooper), who rants about how disgusted he is about homosexuals, and then turns out to have homosexual feelings of his own that apparently cause him a lot of confusion and self-hatred. His wife is near-catatonic, so we never learn much about her.
All these characters come together, and the mystery is, since we know from the beginning that Lester will die at the end (very Sunset Boulevard), who will kill him and how will it happen?
The movie is full of fantastic performances, especially from Kevin Spacey and Annette Benning, with sharp and witty dialogue, and it does keep your interest, but it's not Best Picture worthy in my opinion. It takes itself too seriously, and is too pretentious and self-adulating for my taste. It's not as deep as it thinks it is.
At least now we know the sordid truth: suburbia is a crazy place full of crazy, repressed, miserable people. Such a novel idea. Seriously, these writers must have lived in some pretty interesting neighborhoods to have this kind of impression of the suburban lifestyle.
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| The Sixth Sense. |
Malcolm Crowe: How often do you see them?
Cole: Sear: All the time. They're everywhere...You ever feel the prickly things on the back of your neck?...And the tiny hairs on your arm, you know when they stand up? That's them. When they get mad...it gets cold.
-The Sixth Sense
Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Boy: There is no spoon.
-The Matrix
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| The Matrix. |
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