Dir. Burr Steers, 2002, Cert PG, 97 mins
Cast:
Kieran Culkin, Jeff Goldblum, Susan Sarandon, Claire Danes, Bill Pullman, Ryan Phillipe, Amanda Peet
The best part of the emerging interest in American independent films is that somehow these movies, with their intimate reflections of everyday people in their everyday routine struggling with their everyday problems, speak like no other film genre has to this generation. Amongst the Rushmores, the Swingers, and the Clerks, is the touching story from first-time director Burr Steers, Igby Goes Down.
Igby (Kieran Culkin), a rebellious seventeen-year old is at war with the stifling world of "old money" privilege. With a schizophrenic father (Bill Pullman), a self-absorbed mother (Susan Sarandon) and a shark-like big brother. After flunking out of yet another prep school, Igby is sent to a Midwest military school. Igby figures there must be a better life out there so he goes on the lam and lands in New York, where he hides out at his godfather's, D.H Baines (Jeff Goldblum), weekend pied-a-terre.
There Igby befriends a deviant cast of characters, including his godfather's secret lover Rachel (Amanda Peet), the incurably jaded Sookie Sapperstein (Claire Danes) and the rogue artist/smack dealer Russel (Jared Harris).
Igby is graced with Sookie's affection and love, but his neo-fascist Republican brother Oliver (Ryan Phillippe) interrupts, and Sookie is soon just a friend. D.H Baines stops his financial support of Igby when Mimi Slocumb, his mother, is diagnosed with a relapse of cancer. As Ibgy's world comes crashing down, the questions about family, friends, lovers, and enemies come full circle as he keeps himself from "going down" one final time.
The family story begins with Igby and his brother trying to kill their mother and then the journey to this moment told in flashback. It is not a happy story. But you do get to understand how a young might end up so jaundiced and although the second half of the film is hardly as entertaining as the first, it remains a testament to the pressures society exudes onto each inhabitant and how they cope with them.
Witty, literate and targeting the rich dysfunctional Washington family of the Slocomes, we are in Royal Tennenbaum territory. This is a family based upon bitterness, disappointment, revenge and at the centre of it is Kieran Culkin's wonderfully sarcastic Igby, the young brother who just can't live up to the family standards. Ibgy Goes Down is a clever and refreshing black comedy and an inspired example of the story in which the adolescent hero discovers that the world sucks, people are phonies, and sex is a consolation. Because the genre is well established, what makes the movie fresh is smart writing, skewed characters, and the title performance by Kieran Culkin, who captures just the right note as an advantaged rich boy who has been raised in discontent.
This is a film about Igby growing up - his is not yet 18, and it is a portrait of the sheer malevolence families can inflict upon one another. Yet it is always witty, Igby's sarcasm is literate and perfectly natural. Igby is sharper than most satires about family life and Clare Danes has finally an opportunity to shine as the girl both brothers share. Ryan Phillipe reprises his aloof, distant cold-hearted preppy role that he is so good at and Susan Sarandon as the selfish, substance abusing, tyrannical 'caring' mother is perfectly cast. Peet and Danes complement each other perfectly in their best performances to date. And Culkin repeats his stellar presentation seen in the indie gem The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.
The Culkins are approaching brand-name status, but the thing is, the kids can act. Kieran emerges here as an accomplished, secure comic actor with poise and timing, and there is still another younger brother, Rory, who appears as a younger Igby. Kieran's role is not an easy one. He is not simply a rebellious, misfit teenager with a con man's verbal skills, but also a wounded survivor of a family that has left him emotionally scarred. One of the movie's touching scenes has him visiting his father in the mental hospital, where his father's total incomprehension suggests a scary message: I don't understand my family or anything else, and I've given up thinking about it.
This is Burr Steers first feature film and bodes well for future work.
Shizana Arshad
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