Mommy dearest
>> Susan Sarandon and Kieran Culkin play mixed-up rich people in Igby Goes Down

by MATTHEW HAYS

Wait a minute, I fear a full-fledged, bona fide film sub-genre cliché coming on. It’s the mixed-up, rich offspring of mixed-up rich folks, the parents being so self-absorbed and dysfunctional as to guarantee their kiddies a bad emotional bearing.

Don’t get me wrong, this sub-genre can be handled well. And it has been, from The Royal Tenenbaums to Rushmore in particular, and less remarkably in the recent Tadpole. The films all take place in New York among the privileged classes. The young’uns are dropouts from their elevated social postures. These films seem almost aimed at making us little folk feel better about not being on the big pay scale in the Big Apple: see, rich people have problems too!

Enter Kieran Culkin, kid brother to Macaulay, perfectly cast as the adolescent who’s rebelling against an overbearing mother (Susan Sarandon, cast against type). She’s a social climbing bitch, favouring her older son, Ryan Phillippe, who’s a smarmy Republican. Dear Culkin has the hots for various women he meets through his rich, shallow and nasty godfather (Jeff Goldblum, for whom this role doesn’t appear to be much of a stretch).

As the film opens, we know something has gone quite wrong for this family. Culkin and Phillippe lord over an unconscious Sarandon, attempting to drug her into the afterlife. They conclude that a plastic bag must be placed over her to finish off their business. It’s a harrowing bit of wit, a chunk of coal-black comedy that’s extremely well handled.

The rest of the film, told in flashback, attempts to explain why the endearingly roguish Culkin is so bitter, so furious with his mother, so alienated and so hostile to his Ivy-league, Columbia-enrolled bro.

When Igby Goes Down works, it’s very funny. There are some biting scenes between the various characters, not least of all Goldblum, who has a drugged-up, wacked wife, but sleeps around with a sultry heroin addict on the side. Culkin is soon pursuing his mistress, and when Goldblum finds out his godson and mistress have been shagging, there’s hell to pay.

Igby’s cast works beautifully, in particular Sarandon, who’s terrifically surprising as a capital-b Bitch. She plays the role with aplomb, but never stoops to mere caricature; instead, we get moments pointing to genuine pain and tenderness beyond her wildly dysfunctional façade.

If Sarandon and company get top marks, the film itself suffers, I sense, in such close proximity to a family-collapsing-epic like Tenenbaums. Igby Goes Down is quirky. It has its funny moments, many of them emanating from some very sharp dialogue. And then there’s that aforementioned fabulous cast. But I’m tiring of the adolescent male anti-hero who typifies this kind of movie, and I’m also tiring of what often sounds like upper-class Manhattan whining. :

Igby Goes Down opens Friday, Sept 27

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