Screenplay Written by Craig Johnson and Mark Heyman
Directed by Craig Johnson
***1/2 (three and a half stars)
It will never cease to amaze me when people so adept at making us laugh have an even greater ability for drama, showcasing the fact that these people are not simply "comedians" but actors of substance and power.
"The Skeleton Twins," from Co-Writer/Director Craig Johnson was a film festival favorite at the beginning of this year and now that the film has made its way to our theaters, I can now understand why. This is a piercingly dark, bitter and sad family drama starring two of the most unlikely performers in the leading roles: former "Saturday Night Live" players Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig and they are absolutely sensational as estranged fraternal twins reunited after not communicating for 10 years due to a near family tragedy.
I do tend to have some trouble with films depicting the inner worlds of families as they so often tend to seem as if none of the participants had ever known anything about families in the first place. "The Skeleton Twins" does not fall into such traps in the least as it is perceptive and precise about the bonds and binds family members have with each other despite long stretches of silence and acrimony. Johnson even suggests with his story that perhaps, and even despite how one may wish for life to be in regards to our interpersonal relationships, these just may indeed be the sole people who do know us best after all, making them essential figures to help us navigate the world.
As "The Skeleton Twins" opens, we are introduced to Milo (Bill Hader), a struggling and failing actor in Los Angeles in the midst of preparing his final goodbye. He blasts the music of Blondie, writes a succinct suicide note, slashes h is wrists and retires to the bathtub to die. Meanwhile in upstate New York, Milo's twin sister Maggie (Kristen Wiig), cradling and ready to ingest a handful of pills, receives a phone call of Milo's suicide attempt and hospitalization. Racing to Milo's aid, Maggie and her brother begin the slow, arduous process of re-connection as she invites Milo to stay with her and her agreeably earnest husband Lance (Luke Wilson) back in New York where they grew up and back when their lives truly began to fall apart after the suicide of their Father when they were teenagers.
"The Skeleton Twins" is a family drama and character study that refuses to fall into the many cliches that derail films about dysfunctional families. First of all, Johnson, his actors and his team never treat Milo and Maggie as a "dysfunctional family," so to speak; a family filled with all manner of indie film quirks and self-conscious and self-congratulatory stabs as what might be deemed as "behavior" completely at the expense of creating tangible situations, characters and emotions. What Johnson has achieved is to tell the story of a family, nothing more, nothing less, and the effect, while not necessarily offering anything new to the genre, is one that is honestly presented and enormously felt.
What Craig Johnson achieves through his screenplay with Mark Heyman is to mine and keep discovering the minutiae and intense connections that exists between these sardonic, oddball siblings whom their eccentric Father once nicknamed "The Gruesome Twosome." Whatever their worldview might happen to be, for Milo and Maggie, it is decidedly skewed and seemingly understandable only to themselves; a trait which makes their own adult relationships (even with each other) so tenuous and fraught with eggshell tensions.
For Milo, he is consumed with feeling of professional failure certainly, which he ties to his own shaky sense of self worth. Additionally, his difficulties in maintaining adult sexual relationships and navigating the world as an open gay man presents its own pitfalls, especially as he tracks down and re-ignites the one major love affair of his life with Rich (played by Ty Burrell from television's "Modern Family" in a very strong performance), Milo's former teacher and very closeted homosexual.
As for Maggie, her outwardly lovely life contains much silent suffering as well as its own collection of secrets. While she openly proclaims her excitement that she and Lance are attempting to have a child, she privately continues to take birth control pills and also succumbs to frequent extra-marital affairs, this time with her scuba diving instructor Billy (played by Boyd Holbrook), and even more painfully continues to house her own suicidal tendencies.
Through all of these emotional landmines presented within "The Skeleton Twins," I deeply appreciated how Craig Johnson never descended into melodrama and just allowed his film to breathe naturally, affording us the opportunity to see how Milo and Maggie function (or don't function) together and separately, how they attract and repel each other with their own self-destructive behaviors, how they one-up each other, tear each other apart and somehow find it within themselves over and again to heal and try to face the world on their own terms and with their admittedly weak emotional skill sets.
While I realize that this is a long shot, I seriously hope that both Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig are remembered during the upcoming awards season as their work is exemplary. Bill Hader, especially is stunning, as his entire performance feels as if it is entirely being performed from the inside out. Just listen to how he has altered his voice, his mannerisms and his entire body language in order to instill truth and history within the character of Milo. This is not a showy performance in the least. Just one that feels so complete in its realization. I know nothing of Hader in his real life, but I am telling you, his work within "The Skeleton Twins" felt to me as if he were existing within a state of being rather than acting. Stefon and Hader's many other SNL characters never entered my mind for an instant. In fact, it even felt as if he had never performed on SNL at all! His is a performance that feels not only brilliantly observed but filled with fearless honesty, rage and vulnerability.
Kristen Wiig is Hader's equal on every single count and if I had to bring up SNL for any conceivable reason it is to realize that her effortless chemistry with Hader most likely stemmed from all of their years together on the program, and the comfort she shows with Hader, and often in some very tough emotional territories, is palpable and perfect. She too conveys a sense of rage against and drowning within the disappointments of her own life as she perceived that it should have been regardless of how it looks on the outside. I just think of one sequence set within an ice cream shop where Maggie is accosted by a former high school classmate and she is asked about her life and how Wiig silently plays a lifetime of inner torment, anguish and self-hatred publicly is masterful.
And somehow, for a film this quietly wrenching, it is not without humor and mostly within the sequences with Milo and Maggie are re-discovering their unbreakable connection with each other. A stroll through a cemetery on Halloween night. Cracking each other up with the non-sequesters and inside jokes exclusive to them in Maggie office where she works as a dental hygienist. And most certainly, the film's most talked about scene where they each lip-synch a performance of Starship's god-awful "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" so perfectly that they could go on Jimmy Fallon's show and beat him hands down in a contest. Even so, and as funny as that sequence is, it is also filled with such trauma as the song and their lip-synch game is essentially used as body armor against the world as well as their own demons that threaten to engulf them both.
Craig Johnson's "The Skeleton Twins" is a film that not only deals with internal family stresses and fragile relationships but what happens when depression itself possibly a hereditary disease afflicting the future of two people who just may be too sensitive to face the world on their own. It is a film that also wisely showcases what occurs when the dreams of youth fail, this afflicting one's own perceptions of themselves an d possibly what they feel that can or cannot accomplish in life. It is also a film that shows the perils within two suicidal characters struggling with how to remain in the world as they each dance towards the edges of taking themselves out of the world forever.
And that is where the beauty of "The Skeleton Twins" resides. Johnson plus Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig all deftly illustrate how we are all spiraling through existence, desperately trying to figure it all out along the way and how much of a blessing it is when there is at least one person who understands you more than anyone else, therefore making the existential journey one to spiral through together instead of alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment