X-Men
screenwriter takes a stab at drama with a dull knife.
Dan Harris, the writer-director behind
Imaginary Heroes
, is hard at work writing screenplays for upcoming releases like
Superman Returns
,
Ender's Game
and a remake of
Logan's Run
. Where then, you might ask, in his busy schedule did he find the time to pen this film about an Olympic swimming-hopeful's suicide and its effect on his
dysfunctional-beyond-belief family? Perhaps a better question is "why?"
After promising
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athlete Matt's (Kip Pardue) suicide, the Travis family's carefully constructed façade of happiness begins to crumble. Ben (Jeff Daniels), the father who pushed his son into swimming and demanded perfection, spends long hours staring into space, sleeping in his car and taking his frustration out on his pill-popping younger son, Tim (Emile Hirsch). Sister Penny (Michelle Williams) hides out in college while mom Sandy (Sigourney Weaver) begins a brief love affair with marijuana.
Tim takes center stage as he copes with the daily stresses of high school, including constant torment by bullies and living in the shadow of his handsome and popular dead brother. Having just turned 20 years old, Hirsch easily taps into the awkward despair of a teenager but too often finds himself caught up in the script's "what does it all mean?" moments that take the air out of his performance.
Weaver turns out to be the film's rock, anchoring the most dramatic scenes and generating some of the biggest laughs. Again, though, Harris pummels the performers and the audience with one tragedy after the next, dragging his actors down into the overwrought mud of his script to wallow in the kind of faux-misery one might find on a daytime soap opera.
Though Daniels' Ben is wasted throughout much of the film, he delivers one of the film's funniest and most awkward
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moments. Ben asks Tim if he wants money to go to a Nirvana concert, eliciting laughs from his family at his ignorance of Kurt Cobain's poignant demise 11 years previous. Harris ridiculously parallels the Seattle reference in the form of a "poem" read by the best friend of a girl who just died. Though unacknowledged by the film's characters, the poem quotes word for word from the Pearl Jam song "Alive."
The film continually vacillates between dark comedy and high drama, as tears follow laughter from one scene to the next. The result is a hammy, uneven piece of work that would be better suited as a movie of the week than a theatrical release. Given a modicum of discipline and vision, Harris might have created a dark comedy on par with
Election
or even
Heathers
. Instead, the end result of the meeting of his heavy hand and cynical world-view is a film that, despite a few genuinely funny moments, one can only wish were imaginary.
