I really wanted to love this movie. The trailer made it look wonderfully zany, a bizarre romp through a dysfunctional family, much like The Royal Tenenbaums. And of course the family is bizarre and dysfunctional! And the acting is terrific. Annette Bening must be the best actress in Hollywood today: she takes us through four or five conflicting emotions with every sick line she speaks, and is always overwhelmingly convincing as a mother who doesn't deserve love but somehow inspires it nonetheless. The screenwriters haven't given Gwyneth Paltrow much to work with, but she lights up the screen nonetheless. Jill Clayburgh is wonderful as the doctor's dishrag wife who somehow finds it in her woefully depleted and depressed self to mother a boy who desperately needs mothering--and in the end gives him the nest egg he needs to escape.
Unlike The Royal Tenenbaums, though, this movie is fatally flawed--I think by its point of view. The problem is that Joseph Cross's Augusten Burroughs is our only point of view, and he can only react to the madness he finds himself trapped in with a single obsessive attitude: moral indignation, driving him to want to escape. Since what he is indignant about, what he wants to escape, is the movie, by identifying with him we come to hate the movie and want to escape it. And in fact a good quarter of the people in the theater when I saw it left before the end. I too was tempted, many times, but forced myself to stay. Other users here on IMDb.com tell similar stories. Not a good narrative strategy!
Of course, there are ways around this problem. You can make the other characters so lovably and incorrigibly weird that the viewer feels torn--you both want to escape and want the main character to get over himself. You can make the main character a boring prig that everybody hates and nobody feels inclined to identify with. But Ryan Murphy doesn't find his way to either option--maybe because the whiny main character is his co-writer and co-producer? None of the other characters makes the movie any more enjoyable than its protagonist. None of the characters, including its protagonist, has a character arc. Nobody changes. Nobody grows. Nobody wants anything worth wanting, and nobody gets anything worth getting--except the protagonist, and all he wants is to escape, and while he does get his escape in the end, there is no reason why he couldn't have gotten it 45 minutes earlier or later. Nothing leads up to his escape; we never have a sense of a plot building up to it. All we get, all through the movie, is a little Republican in the middle of dysfunctional chaos, longing for a little middle-class morality, for rules and boundaries, and whining about being victimized when he doesn't find any.
In fact if this movie dramatized anything for me, it was the Christian Right's acting out of its victim status in a "liberal" America. The movie is set in the seventies, when sixties counter-cultural values began to percolate through mainstream America, especially (for this film) psychotherapy and the women's movement, and Burroughs caricatures both mercilessly. And while I'm sure he really did live through something like the events depicted in the book and the movie--this isn't just an allegory of the Christian Right's bathetic suffering in a liberal world--the movie's satirical portrayal of liberalism's social values and practices is way too congruent with evangelical conservatives' militant moral indignation to be accidental.
Unlike The Royal Tenenbaums, though, this movie is fatally flawed--I think by its point of view. The problem is that Joseph Cross's Augusten Burroughs is our only point of view, and he can only react to the madness he finds himself trapped in with a single obsessive attitude: moral indignation, driving him to want to escape. Since what he is indignant about, what he wants to escape, is the movie, by identifying with him we come to hate the movie and want to escape it. And in fact a good quarter of the people in the theater when I saw it left before the end. I too was tempted, many times, but forced myself to stay. Other users here on IMDb.com tell similar stories. Not a good narrative strategy!
Of course, there are ways around this problem. You can make the other characters so lovably and incorrigibly weird that the viewer feels torn--you both want to escape and want the main character to get over himself. You can make the main character a boring prig that everybody hates and nobody feels inclined to identify with. But Ryan Murphy doesn't find his way to either option--maybe because the whiny main character is his co-writer and co-producer? None of the other characters makes the movie any more enjoyable than its protagonist. None of the characters, including its protagonist, has a character arc. Nobody changes. Nobody grows. Nobody wants anything worth wanting, and nobody gets anything worth getting--except the protagonist, and all he wants is to escape, and while he does get his escape in the end, there is no reason why he couldn't have gotten it 45 minutes earlier or later. Nothing leads up to his escape; we never have a sense of a plot building up to it. All we get, all through the movie, is a little Republican in the middle of dysfunctional chaos, longing for a little middle-class morality, for rules and boundaries, and whining about being victimized when he doesn't find any.
In fact if this movie dramatized anything for me, it was the Christian Right's acting out of its victim status in a "liberal" America. The movie is set in the seventies, when sixties counter-cultural values began to percolate through mainstream America, especially (for this film) psychotherapy and the women's movement, and Burroughs caricatures both mercilessly. And while I'm sure he really did live through something like the events depicted in the book and the movie--this isn't just an allegory of the Christian Right's bathetic suffering in a liberal world--the movie's satirical portrayal of liberalism's social values and practices is way too congruent with evangelical conservatives' militant moral indignation to be accidental.