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Seventeen-year-old
Jason Slocumb, Jr. (Kieran Culkin, The
Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys) is a cross between
literary legends Holden Caulfield and Harry Potter, right down
to his Gryffindor-colored scarf.
They all want to get as far the hell away from their
families as humanly possible, though Holden and Harry were never
saddled with a lousy nickname like Igby by their kin.
Even Harry's aunt and uncle look downright big-hearted
compared to Igby's blue-blood home life, which features an
institutionalized boob of a father (Bill Pullman, Lucky
Numbers), a pill-popping ice queen of a mother (Susan
Sarandon, The Banger Sisters)
and a Columbia-bound brother (Ryan Phillippe, Gosford
Park) who constantly sets the bar so high that Igby
never even bothers to try to clear it.
If
that wasn't enough to permanently damage a teenage boy, Igby is
also physically smacked around by just about everyone he
encounters, including his shrink, his filthy-rich godfather D.H.
(Jeff Goldblum, Cats & Dogs)
and his classmates. It's
no surprise Igby has flunked out of every private school on the
East Coast and has a mouth full of enough sass to make Eminem
stand up and take notice. It's
his last expulsion that lands Igby, as promised by mother Mimi,
in military school. When
he goes AWOL and hightails it to New York City to hide out in
one of D.H.'s renovated lofts, Down finally begins to
take some shape after seeming like a train wreck for its initial
30 minutes. If you
can make it this far, Down becomes much more enjoyable.
Then
again, that first 30 minutes might be enough to drive you right
up the frigging wall (or
out of the frigging theatre, as it were).
At times, it seems as if every piece of dialogue is a
punch line, and that's a pretty annoying quality for a film this
tragic. As an
example, Igby meets and falls in love with a
Bennington-student-turned-caterer named Sookie Sapperstein
(Claire Danes, Brokedown Palace)
and shares the following dialogue with her:
Sookie:
"What kind of name is Igby?"
Igby:
"It's a name that a person named Sookie is in no
position to ask."
And
later...
Sookie:
"You call your mom 'Mimi'?"
Igby:
"Heinous One is a bit cumbersome, and Medea was
already taken."
It's
like a Woody Allen movie, except with much darker subject
matter. And Igby's not the only perpetrator either, though he's
usually the instigator. In addition to Sookie, he meets and
moves in with one of D.H.'s many girlfriends (Amanda Peet, High
Crimes) and her artist sidekick (Jared Harris, Mr.
Deeds) who produces about as much art as Ray Romano
does. In other
words, Down is full of extremely unlikable characters
(including, to some extent, Igby himself) with no discernable
means of income, but most of them get their just desserts. Meanwhile,
Igby seems content to waste time until what he believes will be
his inevitable breakdown, just like his pop.
Down
is probably a love-it-or-hate-it proposition, though it's likely
to leave you pretty cold regardless of your overall level of
cinematic enjoyment. The
characters reminded me a lot of the irritating bunch usually
found in Whit Stillman films, which makes sense because
writer-director Burr Steers (he's Gore Vidal's cousin) had a
tiny part in Stillman's The Last Days of Disco (and
Quentin Tarantino's first two films, as well).
His debut, while slightly messy, is certainly promising.
But Culkin comes out of this one smelling slightly
rosier. It's
extremely difficult to make a decent coming-of-age movie these
days (at least I assume it is, since most of them are pure
shit), but Steers and Culkin both do a terrific job of avoiding
the pitfalls that befall its brethren.
| 1:38
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for
language, sexuality and drug content |
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