The tagline on the poster reads ‘the American dream sucks’ , which pretty much tells you where you are – we’re in classic Revolution Road/American Beauty/Ice Storm/Little Children/Hal Hartley country, or the world of Cheever/Updike/Yates if you’re a reader.
The twist is that the set-up – 70s suburbia, bored housewives, greedy husbands, desperate lives seeping away through boredom and alcohol – is here seen through the eyes of one of the children instead of the adults. After all it’s the kids who suffer most, with the damage done by their parents’ boredom and aggression seeping into their young lives, possibly ruining any chance they may have of happiness. Lymelife is strongest on portraying the adult world of 1970s Long Island suburbia in all of its beige hideousness, but never quite makes the leap from that to showing fully how the kids will suffer. It’s a brave attempt though.
The child in question is Scott (Rory Culkin), who has the usual problems – he is being bullied at school and desperately fancies the girl next door, Adrianna (Roberts), but she only has eyes for the older boys. Scott’s parents Mickey (Baldwin) and Brenda (Hennessy) seem to argue the whole time, in between bouts of worrying about their older son Jimmy (Kieran Culkin), who is about to be shipped off to war. Mickey is making money selling ‘the American Dream’ in the form of cheap Long Island houses, and builds a ‘dream house’ on the plot next door, which Brenda, of course, absolutely detests. ‘We can build a tennis court’ he pleads, ‘great, except we don’t have any tennis players in the family’ she icily replies. She also has a weird obsession with Queens, presumably where she and Mickey initially met before heading for the ‘burbs and a new, exciting-sounding but empty life.
Mickey is also, it almost goes without saying, having an affair, with Adrianna’s mum Melissa (Nixon), a fact he barely conceals from his wife, flirting with Melissa in a public bar. Melissa’s husband Charlie (Hutton) is stricken with the disease of the title, a debilitating condition which he caught from a tick bite from a deer. It leads to depression and fatigue, and boy is Charlie suffering from those – he is unemployed, and spends his days sitting in the cellar smoking dope while pretending to be commuting into New York to find work.
It is the painfully young Adrianna who has to explain to Scott what is going on in the adult world – she knows instinctively about the affairs and depressions, but Scott seems to blow his chances with her when he tells his schoolmates he has sexually conquered her. Devastated by his parents’ sudden split, he reacts violently and with possibly disastrous results.
US indie films like this stand and fall on the basis of the scripts, and while Lymelife has plenty of strong moments, it almost talks itself out with half an hour to go. Scene after scene throws together characters confronting each other’s inner feeling and thoughts, but not actually doing much – Mickey and son Jimmy have a rather half-hearted fight in a bar, and he and Brenda have an even shorter argument when they split, but it all seems a little half-hearted. The film can’t seem to decide whether to sympathise with them all or treat them like victims, a la Revolution Road, and ends up doing neither. We are on the side of Scott, but having a kid trying to make sense of the adult world is a cliché and the film at times seems to know it.
Lymelife has a lot going for it though, it has to be said, mainly some of the performances. Baldwin is on superbly creepy form as the oleaginous Mickey, sucking his money from unsuspecting couples for his shabby houses and arguing with just about everybody about everything – at one point he tells his son ‘it’s hard to be a man’. He is certainly struggling. Hutton too is on great form as the sad, ill, pale neighbour, a broken man with one last act of rebellion in him. The less said about Nixon the better (she seems to think she’s still in Sex And The City) but the kids are also great, especially Culkin as a sad teen, doing his Robert de Niro in front of a mirror but armed with a toy gun from Star Wars. Roberts is also good, and has the best line – when he tries to chat her up with a line she has already used about the railways she says: What are you, Walt Whitman now?”
If you’re in the mood for a little American angst, with a cheesy 70s soundtrack and set in what seems to be an eternal autumn, Lymelife will do just fine. It never quite hits the emotional heights, being too talky and moody, but as an addition to the catalogue of films chronicling the death of the American Dream it fits in.
Overall verdict: Moody, broody, downbeat look at life in the ‘burbs with some teenage angst thrown in as a side order. Close but no cigar.
Reviewer: Mike Martin