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Movie:
Igby Goes Down By: Roxbusters (Lawrencerock.com Contributor) |
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| Cast: Kieran Culkin, Susan Sarandon, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Claire Danes, Ryan Phillippe, Amanda Peet, Jared Harris I am often surprised how inaccurate movie poster slug lines can be. It is as if some pencil pusher in the marketing department is given the daunting task of summing up the “gist” of a movie in one bold three or four word statement. Modern forms of art, such as film, are often forced to reside under one label or another. Art is packaged and sold like gum to people who merely chew on it for a depressingly small duration and then spit it out into the gutter when it has lost its flavor. This is our MTV, Pepsi Cola world. We can hardly imagine someone walking into Spain’s Reina Sofia Museum, standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica for two minutes, writing in Sharpie on a white adhesive label “Man, they suffered” and slapping it smack dab in the center of the painting for the rest of its gallery life. I resent all forms of labeling, as if it is possible to define something or someone so simplistically. Labeling gives one license to shut off their powers of thinking and have trite explanations spoon fed to them like a mother stuffing meat paste down her drooling baby’s throat. “Insanity is Relative” is the slug line someone chose to affix to Burr Steers’ new film Igby Goes Down. What are we supposed to understand about this film before we have seen even a frame of it? Well, that the plot has something to do with someone’s insane family, the word “relative” taking on a double meaning. According to this label, we should soon learn that the family in this film is 'insane' and, relatively, they are even more crazy when compared anyone else’s family. Why should we care how insane these people are, while most of us can experience our own family’s equally severe psychoses by simply sitting at the dinner table on Christmas Eve? We should care about this film regardless of the the marketing department's insanity lean. The slug erroneously labels the experience of this film’s SOMEONE named Igby (Kieran Culkin) and our experience traveling with him as he veers through teenagedom with a Holden Caulfield like abandon. Igby is a young man sandwiched into life as a member of an old money, New England family, having one schizophrenic father (Bill Pullman), a misguided, overbearing mother (Susan Sarandon), an emotionally vacant brother (Ryan Phillippe) and a greasy, Hampton party hopping Godfather named D.H. (Jeff Goldblum). Igby falls out of favor with every institute of preparatory education on the east coast, holds up in D.H.’s mistress Rachel’s (Amanda Peet) Manhattan apartment, falls in love with Sookie (Claire Danes), (a young drifter who has as much of a penchant for the philosophic as Igby), and seizes any opportunity to distance himself from his mother and a restrictive, conventional life. This description does not, however, “sum up” the film at all. I took away from this movie a sense that I had witnessed a small part of this boy Igby’s tumultuous pursuit for own his life; a journey that though seemingly without direction, is one that we are happy to see Igby take, for it is of his own design. We are first introduced to Igby: the wise-ass pot smoker. By the close of the film, we are left with a full character that is layered with anger, confusion, happiness and wisdom. Igby’s story is by no means trivial, as others would lead you to believe by referring to Igby as one caught within the throws of your, “average teenage angst.” I hate every single word of that pejorative label, just as Igby would. Experiences that occur between the ages of 10 and 25 years of age can be no less painful than experiencing the death of one’s childhood illusions and being thrust into a reality of predetermined expectations. To add injury to more injury, as a teenager you can experience being thrown into a world where you witness your father loose his identity, your mother loose her life to cancer, the girl you love leave you for your nearest relation, a friend overdose on heroine, and yet still have your experiences all be shoved under the dismissive label “teenage angst”. With all that said, Kieran Culkin is the best Igby that an Igby could be. He embodies all of the inner and outer conflict that Igby struggles with throughout the film, without making us suffer for opting to experience it. Step aside, Macaulay. Burr Steers has created a movie that exposes his characters through witty, deliciously odd dialogue and performances that scream of fragility and desperation. Igby Goes Down can be most easily compared to the work of Wes Anderson (director of Rushmore) without becoming too weird for weirdness sake, as was the case in Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. Steers and Anderson use similar plot lines, and similar means of presentation and character exposition. n conclusion, Igby Goes
Down is an experience worth having and I challenge you to go see
it and come up with our own interpretation. Mine is by no means set
in stone….or Sharpie. -Roxbusters, 9/16/02
On a four horn scale,
Igby Goes Down receives 3 1/4 horns Copyright 2002,
Roxbusters.com
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