BEFORE: Jim Gaffigan carries over from "Tesla", to I think a cameo role as a hotel manager tonight. That's three films this year for Mr. Gaffigan, but Susan Sarandon's having a bigger Movie Year in 2022, I think this will be her SIXTH appearance, she was in three films in the February romance chain (only they weren't all together) and now she's been in three April films - this one, "Robot & Frank" and she was the voice of Lunch Lady Lorraine in that animated film last week. I think she plays Igby's mother here, and we are on the road to Mother's Day now.
If she keeps showing up, she could give Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage a run for their money...
THE PLOT: A young man's peculiar upbringing renders him unable to competently cope with the struggles of growing up.
AFTER: Ugh, I really didn't like this one, it just rubbed me the wrong way, that's for sure. I didn't like the main character, I didn't like any of the characters, probably because they were all so darn unlikable. Just me? OK, it's tough to be a teenager, no matter which kind, but telling me it's tough to be a teenager in a rich family, well, we're maybe just not going to see eye to eye on this point. When we first see Igby and his brother, Ollie, they're in the midst of trying to kill their mother, so this is a really bad start, I'm going to hate these two from the jump, even if later it turns out that maybe there's a Very Good Reason for their actions, it's still not a great way to open a movie, especially if you want me to like these two characters.
After this very odd opening scene, the film snaps back to show us the year (or so) leading up to that moment, but there are also flashbacks to when Igby was a younger kid (and his schizophrenic dad had a freak-out / accident / possible suicide in the shower one morning while Igby was brushing his teeth. We don't see Igby's dad again for the majority of the film, so I assumed he was dead, but then very near the end there's a line about him being in an institution.
Igby hates institutions, especially schools, and he's been kicked out of some of the best for acting out - or did he flunk out? I think it was the latter. His alcoholic mother sends him to a military academy, but before long Igby goes AWOL after being beaten up by his classmates, and he ends up in a room in a Chicago hotel, where the academy drill sergeant tracks him down. (Did he think the expenses on his mother's credit card couldn't be tracked?). Meanwhile, Igby's older brother, Ollie, studies economics at Columbia University.
Igby's sent to New York for the summer to stay with his godfather, D.H. Banes, a real-estate developer on Long Island who's also renovating a loft downtown. Banes needs the loft for his mistress, an actress who's hooked on heroin, and who also has another boyfriend, a performance artist. While being driven to the airport to be sent to the next prep school, Igby ditches the driver and disappears into the sub-culture of NYC, but really he's staying at the loft with his godfather's mistress. Every single character seems to be juggling two relationships here, maybe this is true in some circles, but whatever happened to serial monogamy?
It's kind of a chain - Russel the performance artist is sleeping with Rachel, who's also sleeping with D.H. Banes. Rachel also gets it on with Igby, who then goes on to sleep with Sookie, but Sookie soon leaves Igby for his older brother Ollie, and so on. But there were several scenes where the creep factor was amped way up, like when Ollie first hits on Sookie, and he's just touching her again and again without consent, and that's his brother's girlfriend, it just wasn't cool and was deeply disturbing.
Eventually, we catch back up with that opening scene, or close to it, and we learn that Igby's mother is dying from breast cancer, and she asked for her sons to help her to commit suicide. Mmm, no, that still doesn't make it right, not in my book. The whole point of this movie is that Igby's screwed up because of his mother's influence on him, and then having a part in her death, that's not going to make everything OK, that's probably just going to screw him up even more. It's a bad idea, bad plot point, bad all around. Like that poisoned pudding, this whole film just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Probably not a good film for Mother's Day, either. It's best to burn this one off here before we get too close to the holiday.
Also starring Kieran Culkin (last seen in "She's All That"), Claire Danes (last seen in "Brigsby Bear"), Jeff Goldblum (last seen in "Spielberg"), Jared Harris (last seen in "Dead Man"), Amanda Peet (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Ryan Phillippe (last seen in "Setup"), Bill Pullman (last seen in "The High Note"), Susan Sarandon (last heard in "My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea"), Rory Culkin (last seen in "Scream 4"), Peter Tambakis (last seen in "The Clapper"), Bill Irwin (last seen in "Irresistible"), Kathleen Gati, Celia Weston (last seen in "The Box"), Elizabeth Jagger, Michael Formica Jones, Glenn Fitzgerald, Reg Rogers (last seen in "I Shot Andy Warhol"), Danny Tamberelli, Gregory Itzin, with cameos from Eric Bogosian (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Cynthia Nixon (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Gore Vidal (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon".
RATING: 3 out of 10 meals at the Empire Diner
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