Lymelife
- Directed by Derick Martini
- Written by Derick Martini and Steven Martini
- Starring Rory Culkin, Alec Baldwin and Timothy Hutton
- Classification: 14A
There's a whole lot of American Beauty and The Ice Storm packed into Lymelife – another film that looks back at late seventies' suburbia with a mixture of tenderness and condescension. The tenderness is directed toward the 15-year-old protagonist, Scott (Rory Culkin), a sensitive soul coming of age on Long Island in 1979. The condescension is directed toward materialism, adultery and those middle-class family secrets that continue to smoulder long after the coals on the backyard barbecue have died.
As we all know from watching similar movies, beautiful natural locales with new housing tracts are natural breeding grounds for moral rot. The story of Lymelife focuses on two families, living side by side. Scott's unhappy parents include workaholic, philandering real-estate developer Mickey Bartlett (Alec Baldwin) and his wife Brenda (Jill Hennessy), a fading beauty from Queens, imprisoned by suburban loneliness. When drinking can't dull the pain, she frets about Scott getting Lyme disease, and occasionally Scott's older brother, Jimmy (Kieran Culkin), who joined the army to get out of the house.
Mickey is sleeping with next-door neighbour and employer Melissa (Cynthia Nixon). Her husband Charlie (Timothy Hutton), who has the dread Lyme disease, spends his days staring at a blank television set, cleaning his gun and generally acting like someone who's going to be trouble by the film's third act. (He's a ticking Lyme bomb.) Surely, it's no coincidence that, 30 years ago, Hutton came to fame in Robert Redford's Ordinary People playing the troubled teen in a similar dysfunctional family.
To add to these problems, Scott has a crush on the neighbour's coltishly pretty daughter, Adrianna (Emma Roberts), who alternately flirts with and snubs him. The movie trots Scott through the usual coming-of-age gauntlet of comic humiliations – bullying, loss of virginity, pot – with a few specifically Catholic embellishments. He and Adrianna share confidences while they're both drunk in the confessional.
As the camera pans over the suburban world, the score tinkles along like elevator music, leaving no doubt about the unhappiness of people who live in large houses adjacent to nature. First-time director Derick Martini, who wrote Lymelife with his brother, Steven, can be heavy-handed. The close-ups of plastic model houses with tiny plastic people feel like an indie film parody.
At the same time, Martini shows some skill with his cast, who offer the kind of detailed performances you more typically see on stage than on screen. Nixon's Melissa is shrill and cartoonish, but Hennessy ( Law and Order ) steps into a real character, New Yawk accent, clenched jaw and all. Both the Culkin brothers project a convincing mix of confusion and premature cynicism, while the two male antagonists, Baldwin and Hutton, seem to compete to see who can look more burdened with wounded machismo. They do manage one riveting scene together, when Mickey and Charlie meet by chance in a bar.
As for Lymelife 's muse figure, Roberts (who is Julia Roberts's niece) gets by more on youthful charm than acting, but Lymelife shows she has ambitions beyond her performances in Nancy Drew or Hotel for Dogs .
