Friday, October 18, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

MOVIE REVIEW: Capture of the Wry

Kieran Culkin channels Holden Caulfield in angst-ridden 'Igby Goes Down'

Holden Caulfield is alive and well and living at the movies.

OK, maybe not well. Nobody who's as congenitally allergic to phonies as J.D. Salinger's beloved "Catcher in the Rye" protagonist could ever be well in this inherently hypocritical world.

But as a cinematic archetype, he's experiencing a definite revival.

Sometimes it's in name only. (In "The Good Girl," Jennifer Aniston's title character has a fling with a clinically depressed younger guy, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who calls himself Holden after his literary inspiration.)

In "Tadpole," the idealistic 15-year-old protagonist channels both "Catcher in the Rye" and "The Graduate," lusting after his alluring stepmother but falling into bed with her best friend.

In the scathing "Igby Goes Down," however, almost-18-year-old Igby Slocumb (Kieran Culkin) emerges as the most persuasive Holden Caulfield stand-in yet seen on-screen.

As befits a 21st-century version, "Igby" writer-director Burr Steers surrounds the title character with heaping helpings of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

Well, maybe not rock 'n' roll -- except on the soundtrack. After all, families such as Igby's don't go for such plebeian pleasures. Not in public, anyway.

But drugs? Now that's something both older and younger generations can share.

Certainly Igby's ice-queen mother Mimi (Susan Sarandon) can't get through the days without her signature cocktail: mass quantities of booze, followed by multiple prescription-pill chasers.

And Lord knows what kind of psychotropic medications keep Igby's institutionalized father (Bill Pullman) a virtual catatonic. All the better to dull the pain of a schizophrenic breakdown that played out before his wide-eyed little boy (played in flashback by yet another member of the Culkin clan, Rory -- whom you may remember from "Signs").

As for Igby's golden-haired, golden-boy older brother Oliver (Ryan Phillippe), Igby's occasional watchdog, "he's majoring in neo-fascism at Columbia," Igby informs anyone who asks.

Unlike Oliver, Igby's been kicked out of every prep school on the East Coast -- and, unbeknownst to his petulant mother and dutiful brother, has fled his Midwestern military school to wander around New York, where his unctuous godfather, the cheerful, filthy rich D.H. Banes (Jeff Goldblum) materializes at opportune moments to flash some teeth, flash some cash and smooth things over.

Except, as Igby knows all too well, nothing will smooth out the rough edges of his bleak existence. Not drugs. Not sex with D.H.'s sometime squeeze (Amanda Peet), a dancer who never dances. (She'd rather shoot heroin.) Not even friendship-and-maybe-more with a beguiling Bennington dropout named Sookie Saperstein (Claire Danes), whom he meets at one of D.H.'s smug, self-congratulatory parties.

And certainly not the knowledge that, no matter how many withering witticisms he unleashes, no matter how many times he rejects his dysfunctional family, he's still a little boy lost, desperately searching for a home where he can find his heart -- and himself.

Steers, a theater director and actor who last turned up on-screen in Whit Stillman's witty 1998 "The Last Days of Disco," makes an assured -- occasionally too assured -- big-screen debut.

Demonstrating a gimlet-eyed grasp of life among the rich and infamous, Steers sketches a devastating portrait of have-it-alls who, as Igby knows all too well, have nothing at all.

As with many first-time hyphenates, Steers' reach sometimes exceeds his cinematic grasp.

Clearly, he knows the territory "Igby" occupies, from forbidding edifices of New York and Washington, D.C., to the well-heeled but heedless characters who inhabit them.

But Steers' darkly comic approach remains so cold, so caustic that many of the laughs "Igby" generates catch in your throat, the chuckles becoming chokes as the horror of the humor sinks in.

At times, Steers seems so determined to maintain the movie's acerbic attitude that he overlooks the messy stuff of life. He opts instead for a coldly stylized, artificial tone that undercuts the very real emotions that seem to be eating the characters alive, even if they can't express them.

Fortunately, "Igby's" actors can, ably conveying the bleakness beneath their blithe, automatic-pilot lives.

From Goldblum's grinning ruthlessness to Danes' bright forthrightness, "Igby" overflows with vivid characterizations.

Pullman generates chilling sympathy as Igby's overwhelmed father. And Sarandon quietly, gleefully shatters her often-saintly image with a brittle, bitter portrayal of a prim but undeniable monster. (Then again, as she notes, Igby's "creation was an act of animosity. Why shouldn't his life be?")

Despite life's omnipresent animosity, however, Igby never succumbs to the Slocumb curse, never abandons his search for goodness and truth -- even though he rather doubts their existence.

And Culkin, fulfilling the promise he showed in 2000's "You Can Count on Me" and this summer's "The Secret Life of Altar Boys," proves an ideal Holden Caulfield stand-in, capturing all the smart-aleck rebelliousness, offhand bravado and earnest yearning of a teenage cynic yearning for somebody, anybody, to prove him wrong.

By the time somebody finally brings "Catcher in the Rye" to the screen, Culkin (this one, anyway) will be too old to play the real Holden Caulfield. Until the real thing comes along, however, his Igby Slocumb is as close -- and as good -- as it gets.