Lymelife

There is no dearth of films excoriating the supposed virtues both of marriage and of middle class life in the suburbs; and while Lymelife attaches its overarching theme to this wagon train of self-medicated quasi-misanthropy, it makes the choice not to drop us into the usual perfectly idyllic suburb. Though set in New York, on Long Island, we find ourselves not in the posh digs of the Hamptons, nor on the gritty streets of Queens - but somewhere in between. The idea of purgatory is perhaps deliberately emphasized here - the principals are two families containing two failing marriages that have almost, but not quite, gone over the edge. What Lymelife does better than most films of its kind is to show how some of the pieces are picked up once Toonces drives that car off the road. And then there’s that ending...and so Lymelife both is and isn’t the kind of movie that it looks like it’s going to be; it doesn’t break any new ground, but neither is it entirely derivative of the previous contestants in its weight category.

The story is of the Barletts and the Braggs, two middle class families living on Long Island and trying to get through the rough years of early middle age and teenage offspring. Melissa Bragg (Cynthia Nixon) is in real estate and is having an affair with her boss Mickey Bartlett (Alec Baldwin) because her husband Charlie (Timothy Hutton) is letting his Lyme disease get the best of him mentally and emotionally. Mickey’s wife Brenda (Jill Hennessy) knows her husband is cheating, but she turns a blind eye - perhaps having naïvely elevated the concept of nuclear family above all else.

Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin) and Adrianna Bragg (Emma Roberts) play witness to all of this while trying to navigate the murky waters of late adolescence and also coming to terms with the fact that they, despite (or, yes, perhaps because of) having known each other all their lives, have developed pretty strong feelings for each other. For the most part, they fly under their parents’ radar and do their own thing; and if Adrianna is perhaps a little more tuned in to what’s going on around her, neither of them actually misses all that much of what’s going on with their families.

There are some by-the-numbers scenes from the Coming-Of-Age Playbook, including: Vanquishing The School Bully, The First Kiss, and Losing Your Virginity; and while none of these things is particularly uncommon, they are handled here (particularly the first and third ones) fairly honestly. The sex scene is about as awkward as it can get, and the scene where Scott turns the tables on the school bully is, if not completely authentic, at least as right as the kid in Scott’s shoes would want it to be

Along with these scenes there are some genuine back and forth dialogue scenes between Scott and his brother Jimmy (Rory Culkin’s real-life brother Kieran) who is home from the Army on leave, between Scott and his dad after things between Scott’s parents have come to a head, and between Mickey and Brenda after Brenda discovers that Scott knows Mickey has been bagging Melissa on the side; and while the dialogue oftens rings true, the film doesn’t quite shake the shadow of melodrama. This could be due to the fact that it contains Alec Baldwin, who is a melodrama unto himself; factor in the real-life drama surrounding the infamous phone conversation he had with his daughter, and you start to get a feeling of self-reflexivity coming from this picture - a picture in which Baldwin plays an overbearing, quasi-abusive father.

The film’s tagline is: “The American dream sucks.” I’m pretty sure they were shooting for a send-up of the trappings of middle-class life in modern America, but I’m less sure that they achieve what they set out to do. In this context, the film feels similar to Sunshine Cleaning, which also tried to toe the line between drama and comedy. Lymelife does a better job of it, though - it stays inside the lines and occasionally changes lane after signalling first. Sunshine Cleaning, by contrast, just sort of swerves all over the road and is a danger to other drivers. The only trouble here is that I think Lymelife wants more to play up how ridiculous it is to so relentlessly pursue the American Dream - an objective that would seem to favor comedy as the means to the end. Ultimately, however, the drama weighs on the film, as it becomes clear that while said relentless pursuit is in fact ridiculous, it is also painful; and the film becomes a little too heavy to really achieve its objective. I think this is somewhere between a minor quibble and a major one; and so the film works, just maybe not as well as it might have done.