USA,
2001, 120 min
Shown in 2002
CREDITS
- dir
-
Rose Troche
- prod
-
Christine Vachon, Dorothy Berwin
- scr
-
Rose Troche
- cam
-
Enrique Chediak
- editor
-
Geraldine Peroni
- mus
-
Emboznik
- cast
-
Glenn Close, Dermot Mulroney, Jessica Campbell, Patricia Clarkson, Joshua Jackson, Moiria Kelly
- source
-
IFC Films. FAX: 646-273-7250.
-
COMMENTS
Rose Troche in person.
OTHER
Based on a book of A.M. Homes short stories, Rose Troche’s third film mines the familiar territory of suburbia and its discontents, but with a far greater fondness for its character’s eccentricities than the typical—and rather simplistic—American Beauty or Happiness angst-fests. Devoid of the irony and cynicism common to the genre, Troche instead offers that most radical of all elements to audiences: actual human emotion. Four families stagger at their own speeds through suburbia’s mapless roads, each searching for some way to define themselves. Glenn Close spends her time caring for a son deep in a coma, ignoring her daughter and husband in the process. Neighbor Patricia Clarke, just divorced and with two kids, starts looking for love at the local bar, and might find it in lawn-and-pool boy Timothy Olyphant, while the aerobicized Mary Kay Place hopes to avoid her total boredom with a succession of strangers and workout routines. Lawyer Dermot Mulroney escapes through work, then a succession of buying sprees, while his son escapes through a love affair with... his little sister’s doll. Unattached at first, all four groups slowly move together, with their neighborhood functioning as a complex, often dysfunctional, organism that provides form and eventually meaning to each individual’s total chaos.
FACTOID #336
Bing Crosby was invited several times for an onstage tribute at the Festival, reports then-director Claude Jarman, but declined the honor. “Nobody wants to see those little things that I used to do,” he modestly replied. He did attend though, with wife Kathy and their friend, Rita Hayworth.
