MOTHER KUSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Having made, mostly from his own scripts, more than forty films during his scant time on earth (he was 37 when he joined Mother Kusters in heaven), Rainer Werner Fassbinder was as interesting as he was prolific. Probably he was the best-known member of the West German “New Wave” which, beginning in the ’60s, transformed a moribund national cinema into a hothouse of vibrant expression. And an actor himself (though not a very good one), he elicited great performances.
     Fassbinder always was himself: distanced, difficult, more than a bit self-indulgent, and—how well we now know—irreplaceable.
     With its Brechtian title and cool Brechtian analysis, Mother Kusters is a wonderful piece of work. Its beginning-point is off-screen; factory layoffs from a downsizing company move one worker, till then nondescript, to kill both his boss and himself. Fassbinder thus assails coldblooded capitalism; but this is only his first stop on an impeccable list of targets. For the widow of the dead worker is descended upon by a pack of media who coldbloodedly intrude on her grief and distort the truth, robbing her spouse’s last acts of their political import just to promote “better copy,” a grotesque portrait of violence and instability. In particular Frau Kusters feels betrayed by her daughter’s lover, a reporter, whose promise of fair coverage turns up empty. Abandoned by her son and his spouse, who were living with her and her husband, Frau Kusters seeks solace from solicitous Communists who pledge to rehabilitate Herr Kusters’ reputation by broadcasting the truth. Taken in, she becomes a Party member and activist. But instead of keeping their word these “armchair communists” pursue their priority of an upcoming election, frustrating Frau Kusters, who knows time is of the essence in reversing the image of her husband that the media have put forth. Therefore, she now joins young anarchists in demanding a retraction from the daily that has led the media distortion; but these anarchists also have their own agenda, embroiling Frau Kusters in a hostage-taking and a confrontation with police. Misled and used by everyone in sight, Frau Kusters ends up dead—off-screen, like her spouse. Mother Kusters goes to heaven.
     Here, narrative takes precedence over the film’s visual aspect. (Those, like me, who disparage plot in contemporary cinema must watch this film and marvel.) What a story indeed it is—one showing how people are variously exploited, yet one so constructed that a single ordinary character is many times the victim. (Brigitte Mira is excellent as Frau Kusters.) In the midst of so much conniving and corruption, this person is redeemed by two things: her innocence, and her steadfast pursuit of justice in the service of her husband’s memory—an application, perhaps, of her innocence. (From Fassbinder, no innocent, this appreciation of the character is deeply gratifying.) The media promulgate so many untruths in the course of the film we all must wonder whether they are accurate in reporting that Frau Kusters was in on the hostage-taking and the anarchists’ extortion plot. We aren’t shown any of this; Fassbinder leaves it to us to imagine Mother Kusters’ outcome. His film may be cynical, but it’s never vicious or mean (not even, mind you, to those who exploit and victimize)—and heaven knows how accurate it is. And so, at last, does Mother Kusters.

THE RAINMAKER (Francis Ford Coppola, 1997)

I have not read the book The Rainmaker, or anything else by John Grisham, but the story that Francis Ford Coppola (along with co-scenarist Michael Herr) has brought to the screen is founded on a cliché: the enthusiastic young lawyer whose idealism is tested by actual legal experience. Admittedly, lawyers are a strange breed, but in reality, with most of us non-lawyers, the opposite is as often the case: hard-won through experience, idealism replaces, gradually, the cynicism of youth. Movies couldn’t care less about that, however—not Christian movies determined to tailor their stories to the myth of the Fall of humankind and Original Sin. Once again, therefore, this particular movie requires us to go down a wearily worn narrative path. The one twist here is, at the end, faced with his corruptibility, the young hero is poised to give up the practice of law. Yeah, right.

Coppola makes “Christian movies”—movies informed by the dogma he loves. His persistent theme for over thirty years has been the corruptibility, or corruption, of people. It’s a depressing theme, and because Coppola has few gifts as filmmaker the energy level of his films tends to be determined by this theme’s unhappiness. In The Rainmaker this is more, not less, the case than usual because the hero, Rudy Baylor, fresh out of law school (he passes the Tennessee state Bar exam early in the film), is a glum individual, his almost pathologically repressed nature, the film would have us believe, the result of his growing up being beaten by his father and watching his father routinely beat up his mother. Unfortunately, and quite cruelly, the film imposes this repression on us in a double dose, for not only must we watch Baylor behave in his (except for violent punctuations) flat, tightly controlled way, but we must listen to his voiceover, which is pitched in the same repressed emotional key. Too, beyond the film’s narrow range of attention there is something trebly disconcerting in the fact that Baylor’s deviations from his monotonous personality almost invariably take the form of violent outbursts. I suppose one might cleverly argue that this exposes his father’s legacy, but, believe me, one would be hard-put to find a film less inclined to psychological probing or realism than this one.

Baylor joins a marginal, ambulance-chasing “law firm,” a one-man operation whose single operative, who is unlicensed, haunts newspapers and a Memphis hospital to drum up personal injury claims. The firm belongs to “Bruiser” Stone (Mickey Rourke, good), an amiable shyster who exits, early, ahead of the authorities who are after him for corrupt dealings. Stone’s one employee, Deck Schifflet (such names, presumably, are possible in the South), becomes Baylor’s partner in their own firm, to which Baylor has brought two clients: Miss Birdie, who has become his landlady since the time he drafted her will, and Dot and Buddy Black, whose son, Donny Ray, is dying of leukemia. (Too?) ironically named, the Great Benefit Insurance Company has repeatedly denied the Blacks’ claim, thus blocking the poor family’s access to the bone-marrow transplant that has a 90% chance of saving their boy’s life. The civil trial pertaining to the Blacks’ lawsuit against Great Benefit takes up the lion’s share of an unnecessarily long and pedestrian film. (Corny connection: the name Black and the fact that Baylor entered the law inspired by civil rights attorneys. Is this the level at which Grisham writes, or was this silliness concocted for the film?)

Compulsively watchable and highly entertaining, the trial eventually exposes Great Benefit as a scam preying on the poor, whose claims are routinely denied regardless of merit. Jon Voight, always at his best when playing distasteful characters (recall Milo, in Catch-22), is at-home as the insurance company’s head lawyer. The scenes of Donny Ray dying, and of the boy’s eventual death and the post-funeral family gathering, are another matter. Why must Donny Ray be strikingly handsome? Would he be less entitled to a bone-marrow transplant if he looked ordinary? Why must the bereaved father blubber so, embarrassingly even parading a photograph of the deceased around the courtroom? Besides assaulting the dignity of the poor, this silly sentimentality seems too heavily invested with Coppola’s own sense of loss following the death of a son about a decade earlier. It cloys; it distracts.

But the worst aspect of the film by far involves Kelly Riker, whose spouse batters her continually. Baylor befriends this girl and falls in love with her. Let us set aside the incestuous implication here, with which the film doesn’t attempt to deal; one may defend it by saying that other men also fall in love with women whom (consciously or unconsciously) they in some way identify with their mother. But once Kelly bludgeons the batterer to death, and isn’t even tried for manslaughter when the prosecutor decides she is conviction-proof, the film strays into the most agitated and repellent sort of melodrama, especially since the specter of Christian sacrifice looms; before Kelly finishes the job behind a conveniently closed door, it is Baylor himself who has brought Cliff Riker to the verge of death with the aluminum bat that Riker had been wielding against him and Kelly. I am not making this up: Kelly haults Baylor from dispatching her mate, sends the boy away, and then completes the job herself. (Again: Is this the low level at which Grisham writes, or has this tawdry nonsense been concocted for the film?) Still, Kelly—atrociously acted, incidentally, by Claire Danes—accounts for the film’s one loose end. The film literally ends with Kelly’s being under Baylor’s care as he plans for their life together. Suddenly we recall Baylor’s first instinct regarding her; Kelly is “dangerous.” Thus Coppola plays his audience by delivering a crafted, coldblooded ambiguity that divides the audience into different camps depending on the viewer’s attentiveness and level of sophistication. Some will sigh at the happy ending; others will realize that in time Kelly is likely to find some pretext for killing Rudy Baylor. Frankly, I would have deleted the early “dangerous” reference and left the ending upbeat. The Rainmaker is too fragile intellectually to support the idea of such “pretty poison”—not to mention the mockery it extends to the theme of wife-battering.

All in all, this is a decent film, especially for a Coppola film. It has its lapses (like Coppola’s fixation on female derrières, which embarrassingly determines a few camera set-ups—as odious a distortion of the purpose of mise-en-scène as some other directors’ fixation on male bottoms). It’s poorly acted, to be sure, by Danes, Andrew Shue (Elisabeth’s brother) as Cliff, Danny Glover as the judge, and Damon, who would artistically rebound the following year as a law student in Rounders. Most of the rest of the acting, however, is quite good. I have already noted the contributions of Rourke and Voight. (We see too little of Rourke, too much of Voight.) Better still are Dean Stockwell as a corrupt judge, Teresa Wright as the charming, kind-hearted Miss Birdie, and especially Danny DeVito, who brings a glint of abiding idealism to Deck’s smarminess and cynicism. Moreover, DeVito uses his diminutiveness spiritedly and agilely. Lastly, he finds the humor in his role without turning Deck into an irrelevant exercise in comic relief. DeVito’s performance here is refreshingly distinctive; he essays a largely self-contained individual—a Sancho Panza who is after all his own Don Quixote.

WITH BEAUTY AND SORROW (Masahiro Shinoda, 1965)

From Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s novel, Masahiro Shinoda’s Utsukushisa to kanashimi to lends exquisite mise-en-scène and color cinematography to a romantic melodrama about a monstrous revenge plot. A young woman avenges her same-sex lover, who years ago was seduced and abandoned by a now famous writer and bore their stillborn child, by seducing his son and drowning him.
     Let us set aside the material’s ludicrous scenario for the origin of a lesbian; that presumably came with the story. Moreover, let us concede that there are insinuated ambiguities, the most tantalizing of which is this: Although the younger lesbian hatches the scheme herself, with her lover attempting to dissuade her, it is possible that the scheme extends to reality something of the latter’s own fantastic wish, especially now that an unexpected reunion with her former heterosexual lover has rekindled feelings for him, thus endangering the basis of her life since him. Where does one woman’s self-loathing end and the other’s jealousy begin? And to what extent does the man’s living son exacerbate the wound of the lost child? There are glimmers of real psychological stuff here.
     But it is very hard for me to categorize this film as anything but trash. The style is overwrought; and while Kaoru Yachigusa gives a nuanced performance as the older woman, Otoko Ueno, Mariko Kaga is so hysterically unnuanced as Keiko, Otoko’s beloved, that the character seems to have drifted in from some lesbian horror movie.
     In any case, perhaps the man’s story would have been the more interesting one to tell. (Perhaps the novel does give it equal treatment.) The most intriguing action, after all, is his contacting Otoko after so many years, presumably spurred by haunting regret, lingering feeling and, implicitly, disappointment in his long marriage.

THE PARADINE CASE (Alfred Hitchcock, 1947)

The Paradine Case has long been relegated by critics to the bottom rank of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, and it’s easy to see why. The film version of Robert Hichens’s novel is so overproduced by David O. Selznick that the elaborate sets never seem real—a failure driven home when a character tries “making himself at home” by tossing his hat onto a chair after a hard day’s work. The swelling score by Franz Waxman matches the gigantism of the sets. The murder mystery at least appears simplistic, and the stretch of the trial is tedious—set-up, mostly, for a pair of stunning revelations. Too, some of the acting is debatable. Certainly the lead performance by Gregory Peck as Anthony Keane, an allegedly brilliant British defense attorney, is shallow, mannered and wooden; Hitchcock had envisioned Laurence Olivier in the role, but because Peck was under contract to Selznick, and Olivier was not, Peck had to have his hair unconvincingly (and inconsistently) grayed as he (sometimes laughably) struggled with an English accent. Two European actors whom Selznick had just signed for his studio also thwarted Hitchcock’s casting aspirations: from France, Louis Jourdan, who plays André Latour, the murder victim’s young valet, a role in which the director envisioned rough and homely Robert Newton; and from Italy, beauteous Alida Valli (for her American debut, billed alluringly as just “Valli”), who plays the accused, Maddalena Anna Paradine, a role that Greta Garbo—gorgeous, too, goodness knows, but past forty—had been poised to come out of retirement to play. I don’t mind either Jourdan or Valli, the latter of whom is nothing short of emotionally spectacular, but Garbo, surely, would have made more sense in the role, and a director’s triple disappointment at the starting gate isn’t something a studio head should be courting. In an art-friendly world, the money would cede to the artist, not vice versa.

Time and attention freed up because his personally produced Duel in the Sun (King Vidor et al., including Selznick himself, 1946) had been released to public clamor and critical dismay, Selznick was all over The Paradine Case, whose script he even credited himself with having written. (Others who tried bringing it into English included James Bridie, Ben Hecht and Hitchcock’s spouse, Alma Reville, who I believe came out of retirement for the desperate occasion). Hitchcockians tend as a result to dismiss the film as being Selznick’s rather than Hitchcock’s.

But wait. It’s odd how aspects and moments of the film anticipate aspects and moments of later Hitchcock films we cherish. Let me cite three examples. Anthony Keane’s visit to his client’s and her deceased spouse’s bedroom in their country retreat, with its mesmerized subjective camera, anticipates Lila Crane’s perusal of Norman Bates’s bedroom in Psycho (1960). Keane’s obsessive infatuation with his client anticipates Scottie Ferguson’s infatuation with, well, whoever she really is, in Vertigo (1958); here it is the client he falls in love with, while in Vertigo it is the client’s wife. Thirdly, there is the plot element sprung into action by Latour’s court testimony, that he feels so ashamed of having sexually betrayed his master that he can’t go on living. The judicial system does nothing to help him; indeed, no one responds (even ineffectually) to keep him from committing the suicide he clearly, openly announces he intends to commit. Recall how Miss Lonelyheart’s suicidal intention almost gets lost in the shuffle of the general desire to catch the perpetrator of an already committed murder in Rear Window (1954)? As usual, humane to his core, Hitchcock is on the side of the angels.

The plot begins here: Paradine, a blind military hero, dies of poison at home. His wife, foreign and younger, is accused of murder, although her defense attorney, who is renowned, pursues the idea that it was a case of “assisted suicide”—that actual term is used in the film—until, having himself become, although married, thoroughly infatuated with his client, Keane argues instead that Latour murdered his boss and military commander because he, Latour, was in love and having an affair with his master’s wife, whose lowly social origins match his. As do Keane’s, more or less, making the assumed murderer (though not by the Crown) a projection of the man determined to pin the murder on him, the valet, in order to (a) exonerate his client (rationalization), (b) eliminate his romantic competition for the accused (unconscious motivation), and (c) deny his own feelings, so as to retain his marriage in his own mind, even though no one else, including his wife, is missing the direction of his romantic obsession. In court, Keane, jealous, pins the murder on Latour. His client protests, turning against him, but never with such virulence as when Latour commits suicide. Mrs. Paradine confesses in open court; it is left to us to decide whether her confession is due to her having murdered her husband or to her desire to strike out at her attorney over the loss of her lover. (No one in the film takes Maddalena’s “confession” at other than face value. Leave it to Hitchcock to worry us alone—the countless numbers of us—about her peculiar confession and what it might or might not mean.)

I find The Paradine Case most interesting on two fronts. One, Maddalena’s sacrifice, to become the “eyes” of her blind, much older military spouse, provides a compelling metaphor for postwar Europe’s desire to continue, including for the sake of others: selfishness rationalized as selflessness—to wit, survival. Wonderful; like Notorious (1946), one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces, The Paradine Case is about surviving. (One feels this beneath the luxury that Selznick imposed as a matter of course.) In tandem with this, Latour’s name may suggest “tour of duty,” that is, the military past shadowing the present, since Latour’s devotion to Paradine (“. . . my Colonel . . .”) refers to the time Latour served in Paradine’s regiment during the war. Symbolism shimmers here, making one ask how helpful or appropriate is this continuance of military feelings as Latour shows that he embodies in peacetime. The film’s other fine front is the marriage of the Keanes, Tony and Gay. Hitchcock had already portrayed marriage profoundly (Rebecca; Suspicion; Shadow of a Doubt), and The Paradine Case peculiarly resonates with the complexities of marriage. Anthony and Gay really seem a couple; the threat to their marriage, triggered by Anthony’s infatuation for his client, compels.

The film’s dialogue is at its best, by a wide margin, when dealing with this marriage and its hums and outbursts, and Ann Todd, who plays Gay, delivers one of the film’s two best performances. Gay loves as well as adores her Tony, and as a result she is willing to weather, among other things, Keane’s current bout of indifference toward her and his current belief that he is in love with Maddalena. (At one fine moment she tells him he isn’t through with her yet, despite Mrs. Paradine.) Aware of her deficit of brilliance vis-à-vis her spouse, Gay knows her exact place in Tony’s life under the best of circumstances, and she is there, for him and—let’s be frank—herself when pieces need to be picked up after Maddalena, in open court, turns on her defense attorney for lethally turning on her lover, Latour. Todd would proceed to be a fine actress for husband David Lean (One Woman’s Story, 1948; Madeleine, 1949; The Sound Barrier, 1952), but for Hitchcock, homeliness and pocked skin and all, she delivers the performance of a lifetime. Selznick and Hitchcock succeed in making Todd (improbably) gorgeous in her final appearance in the film, when she stands by her man and encourages him to weather the fallout from Mrs. Paradine’s verbal assault on him in court: “Incidentally, darling, you do need a shave,” she tells him, touching his cheek in a subjective (point-of-view) shot. He enfolds her hand in his. Heart-walloping.

Peck’s the problem. (When isn’t he?) Thanks to the fact that Hitchcock stretches his limited ability to the utmost, Peck is somewhat better than usual, but it’s not enough. He looks like a boy straining hard to look like a man. (William Holden, on the contrary, could simultaneously seem both boy and man.) Earnest Peck is no Olivier. In particular, Peck’s repertoire of emotional possibilities excludes both humiliation and humility, and the role of Keane requires him to register both, and to know what the difference between them is. When Maddalena turns on her defense attorney in open court, exposing (even to him) how damaging his love for her is (a love she has encouraged, manipulated), Keane is humiliated, whereupon, heretofore the legal cat’s meow (or, in British parlance, mew), he rises to humility, perhaps for the first time in his adult life. (We watch Gay suffer though the former, and later she tells him she is proud of him over the latter.) With hunky-California-boy, we see neither the precipitous drop into humiliation nor the subsequent rise to humility, and since the patch-up of the Keanes’s marriage depends on both character conditions, the burden of credibility shifts wholly to Todd, who thankfully, under Hitchcock’s guidance, is up to carrying it. Indeed, this inequality of acting talent even resonates, for isn’t it also the case that Gay carries the principal burden of responsibility for the Keanes’s marriage?

The other excellent performance in the film comes from Ethel Barrymore as the sadistic judge’s wife. Barrymore usually plays strong women. Here, her character is morally strong, I suppose, but in every other way Lady Sophie Horfield is weak and pathetic. Charles Laughton is good as her spouse, Lord Thomas Horfield—Tommy, to his wife. This portrait of a power-skewed marriage, Hitchcock apparently feels, predicts the future of the Keanes’s marriage, tempering our delight that the Keanes stick it out. In time, Tony may be Tommy: cold, obscene, malicious, judgmental in the extreme in and out of court—and condescending and brutally unkind to his wife. The film’s ending is thus painfully ambiguous, and Hitchcock somehow helps us feel both emotions: poignant delight at the couple’s renewal; worry for times ahead.

Charles Coburn is a hoot as the Paradine barrister who turns over the criminal case to Keane. He sees everything, including each jot of the much younger Keane’s drop into sexual infatuation. Coburn provides a visible index of Hitchcock’s cunning perspective on the action. In this context I must mention one of Hitchcock’s minor coups in the film, where we are quite impressed by an element of the film’s use of subjectivism. The next time Keane sees Mrs. Paradine after being told by Latour that she is evil, we ourselves see this possibility in her for the first time. We catch a coldness in her eyes that earlier didn’t seem to be there.

I like this movie. It must be the case that I do; I watch it again and again.

THUMBSUCKER (Mike Mills, 2005)

Thumbsucker, writer-director Mike Mills’s first feature, was shot in Beaverton, Oregon, a placid, sterile, parochial suburb of Portland. Mills has repeatedly misidentified the town as “Beaverwood,” a mistake that is apt since Beaverton, like many suburban communities, can hardly be said to have an identity of its own. One of the film’s attributes is how well Mills has captured the town’s insularity and the quietly desperate lives such an atmosphere accommodates. Based on a novel by Walter Kim, the film is a sympathetic portrait of an unhappily self-involved, self-uncertain place.

It’s a comedy, of the coming-of-age variety with which the independent American film landscape is currently overpopulated. The protagonist is Justin Cobb (Lou Taylor Pucci, best actor, Berlin, and excellent), a diminutive seventeen-year-old boy who still sucks his thumb, to the indulgence of his mother, Audrey, and the clichéd consternation of his father, Mike. (The cliché belongs to the character, not to the film.) Audrey is a nurse; Mike manages a sporting goods store. In their own ways, both are backward like their elder son. Audrey dreams of winning a date with her favorite TV personality; Mike is still nursing the long-ago disappointment of the professional football career that did not materialize due to injury. Mentally, he is stuck in high school, where he was a star bedecked with great expectations. Unbeknownst to him, his wife is happy she did not end up with a pro player, but he is convinced that he failed her by not becoming one, just as he failed himself and everyone else. Figuratively speaking, poor, big Mike still sucks his thumb.

Marriages are mysterious things, and many do tote all kinds of secrets—secrets that partners keep from the world; secrets that partners keep from each other. But the one I just described sounds pretty contrived to me. It is the sort of secret that would have tumbled out, or more gently come to light, years earlier. It is hard to believe that the Cobbs’s secret—that Mike has become a man with whom Audrey is dissatisfied because he never figured out he was the man she really wanted just the way he was—is left intact in the film. Mike never emerges from his sense of failure, while Audrey’s job promotion compensates for some of her unhappiness at home. Why has Audrey not divulged to her husband what she so easily tells her son? Or has she, and he hasn’t believed her? Can’t she see how important it is to tell her husband the truth?

Much of the humor of the film derives from the to-do that is made of Justin’s harmless practice of thumbsucking. At school, where to reveal it would be too uncool, Justin is shown several times behind the locked door of a bathroom stall, his pants down around his visible ankles, where he is presumably moving his bowels but, we know, really sucking his thumb. The stall is his retreat, and this comical punctuation is a high point of the film’s visual wit. Overall, though, the visual dimension of this film is minimal; plot and dialogue are forced to carry most of the content that the images ought to express. As writer-directors go, Mills is more writer than director, and thus Thumbsucker is mostly doomed from the start as a serious piece of work. It is charming and funny, but it could have accomplished a good deal more.

Justin, prescribed Ritalin, becomes a champion regional debater for his school. The film scores good points for showing how this ill-advised “solution” and others only end up making matters worse for the boy in terms of his behavior. The once sweet boy becomes cold and arrogant. If only people would just let him suck his thumb! On the other hand (pardon), Justin is truly beset with adolescent problems that require some sort of remedy.

Apparently his thumbsucking is causing chronic difficulties inside his mouth, and the best scenes in the film are those between Justin and his orthodontist, Dr. Perry Lyman, hilariously played by Keanu Reeves, possibly as a parody of the shrink that Robin Williams plays in Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997). Even Lyman comes to admit that he impressed upon Justin a lot of “hippie psychobabble” while hypnotizing the boy and attempting to convert Justin’s oral fixation into a meditative fixation on his “power animal.” (Justin: “Aren’t you just my orthodontist?” Perry: “I like to think I am more than that.”) The exchanges of these two odd characters, guru and disciple and then, later, deposed guru and rebellious disciple, clarify the film’s main theme: the extent to which, insecure, we are affected and influenced by others. In Thumbsucker, both kids and adults have unstable egos, and everyone is more or less taking everyone else’s advice. The one exception seems to be Justin’s younger brother, Joel, who may be TV-sitcom glibly too much of a grown-up.

Indeed, the scenes that Perry and Justin share, both in the dentist’s office and outside, intrigue by their lack of realism and their heady suggestion of psychological realism. Is Perry Lyman a figment of Justin’s imagination, a fiction in his head that Justin privately uses to sound out alternative possibilities for working his way out of his problem(s)? I must leave to others whether Perry’s professional diagnosis that Justin’s thumbsucking is the “underlying cause” of his dental problems holds water (or saliva); offhand, this sounds like Justin’s adolescent anxiety to me. What is undeniable, however, is that nothing about Perry seems real. There is no dental assistant by his side when he works on Justin, the quiet insularity of their encounters is unearthly, and, with each new appearance of his, Perry seems to have replaced the philosophy he formerly tried to impose on Justin, responding with absurd wholeheartedness to Justin’s remarks much as Justin has been affected by his remarks. His nonsense about calling upon one’s imagined “power animal” seems the tip-off that Dr. Perry Lyman is unreal and, instead, Justin’s mental construct; and the pun hidden in his name, “Lie Man,” does nothing to dispel the notion. We also learn that Mike is jealous of Perry’s superior athletic prowess in various community competitions. Through Perry, then, we see how (1) Justin feels about himself, (2) how Justin feels about his father, and (3) how Justin feels his father feels about himself. Reeves flawlessly negotiates all these levels of Justin’s fantasy—and, as a bonus, provides a wonderful sense of the comical side of Justin that Justin otherwise dares not express.

Justin has a one-sided romance, but this adds little to the film. His farewell to his folks before flying off to college in New York City accounts for an exceptionally poignant scene—one that gives Mike the best line in the film. He tells his son, “I was just getting used to you.”

Tilda Swinton, who also executive-produced, is very touching as Audrey, who provides the surest index of Justin’s adolescent limitations, for Mills permits us to see that she has dimensions to her life that her elder son neither guesses nor can fathom. Swinton, looking terrific, gives the best performance in the film. I am sorry to say, because he is a Brooklyn boy and, by all accounts, a hardworking, decent individual, Vincent D’Onofrio is all thumbs as Mike Cobb.