Two acclaimed US Indies, The Skeleton Twins and Say When, are hitting our screens this week. Both are Sundance alumni, benefit from a notable cast and mix elements of drama and comedy to heart-warming result. For those willing to take the pulse of the current American independent filmmaking they would make a perfect double bill.
Best of the two is “The Skeleton Twins” (a title that feels like a euphemism for “Suicidal twins”), whose principal attractive is to be an acting showcase for well-known comedians getting out of their comfort zones and dusting their dramatic chops. Saturday Night Live Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig are siblings Milo and Maggie. The film begins with Milo trying to commit suicide and Maggie being prevented from ingesting a box of pills by a call from the hospital telling her about her brother’s situation. They haven’t talked to each other for ten years, but Maggie goes from NY to LA and offers Milo the chance to stay with her until he feels better. Milo, recovering from a broken relationship and a failed attempt to become an actor, once in NY he looks for Rich (Modern Family’s Ty Burrell), an ex-teacher and former flame, now a father still in the closet. Maggie has built a perfect family life with salt of the earth hubby (Luke Wilson) just to find out she may not be cut for it. Their reconnection will be no less than abrupt, with Milo’s abrasive temper coming often in the way. After he invites their neglecting mother for dinner a can of worms gets reopened.
Craig Johnson has crafted a likeable second feature that begins in a dark place exploring broken family relationships, but gets lighter as the siblings are forced to confront unhealed wounds from the past and retrieve their lost bond. A central scene when they lip-synch a rendition of Starship’s 80s classic ‘Nothing Gonna Stop Us Now’ memorably resets the vibe towards a more life-affirming tone. The cast is uniformly good and wholeheartedly grabs this opportunity to perform more serious roles, yet it can’t help but infusing some welcome touches of comic relief in the rather obscure plot, whose main flaw is perhaps to pile up on the disturbing dysfunctional elements of its characters’ background. ★★★
The second on this imaginary double bill is Lynn Shelton’s ‘Say When’, which also flaunts a star-studded cast headed by a Keira Knightley in “not period drama” mode, with all the up and downs this normally entails. Megan is a 28 year-old graduate who still hasn’t found her way in life, feeling peer pressure to settle down but remaining unconvinced about commitment. After her incredibly dull long-time boyfriend proposes during a friend’s wedding, she runs away and ends up befriending Anikka, a 16 year-old girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her pals. In need to lay low while making her mind up about the proposal, she would stay in her new friend’s place for a few days. Once there, the seeds for romance will be planted when Anikka’s divorced father, the ever reliable Sam Rockwell, will suspiciously start enquiring about the nature of such strange age-gap friendship.
Originally titled ‘Laggies’, a sort of slang to describe people who lag behind in life, Shelton’s third feature doesn’t really dig too deep into its subject. An screenplay that offers quite a few laughs, sometimes at the expense of character credibility, lacks of insight and prevents the film from developing its full potential. What could have been an accomplished generational portrait takes an easy way out as a crowd-pleasing romantic comedy that doesn’t fully satisfy. ★★½
These two enjoyable movies, boasting fine performances and decent writing leave, however, a bittersweet taste in our mouths when we look at them in the context of the current state of American independent filmmaking. Since the 80’s, the indies have become a bold and challenging force in cinema, pushing the boundaries of the industry by exploring areas the mainstream would have never dared to; renovating many traditional genres and somehow creating one of its own. Nowadays, they seem to be accommodated into an audience-friendly dramedy format, which often feels like it’s filling the gap for certain types of movies Hollywood can’t be bothered to make anymore.
Identity signs of the average contemporary indie would indistinctively include the remains of a dysfunctional family (both Skeleton Twins and Say When feature one) for dramatic value, plus some quirky characters or situations to toy with on its comic side; all of it sugar coated and finished in family values, adding the feel-good factor that brings the audiences in; a formula that with various degrees of success may still work quite well, but most times feels disingenuous and made us sorely miss the ability to take risks and break rules commonplace not that long ago.