Friday, January 27, 2006

Finger-lickin' Thumb-suckin' good

There are a few actors whose names are an automatic selling point for me when they appear on film posters: Robert de Niro, Jack Nicholson, Steve Buscemi... Suffice to say that spotting the names of Keanu Reeves and Vince Vaughn doesn't exactly have me rushing to the cinema with feverish excitement and anticipation, but both appear in 'Thumbsucker', which I saw at the Electric Cinema earlier in the week.

Based on a novel by Walter Kirn, 'Thumbsucker' is as indie as they come, not least because it's soundtracked by The Polyphonic Spree and Elliott Smith - the involvement of Reeves and Vaughn aside. Mercifully, their "star quality" and predominantly lame performances (as an oddball orthodontist and an unconventional teacher respectively) don't detract from what is by and large a very good film.

The thumbsucker of the title is seventeen-year-old Justin Cobb, and the film explores with a careful sensitivity and from an unusual angle the traumas of adolescence. The subject matter actually reveals itself to be rather broader, though: the strategies and mechanisms by which people find comfort and cope with the world around them - thumbsucking, drugs (whether prescribed or illegal), flights of imagination, cod-philosophies, self-deceiving fictions.

As Justin, Lou Taylor Pucci is excellent, and much of the film's drama comes from his interrelation with his parents Mike and Audrey, played brilliantly by Vincent D'Onofrio and Tilda Swinton. What is wonderful about this film is that it illustrates that "ordinary" interfamilial relations, when scrutinised, can be extraordinarily complex.

Disappointingly, as with another relatively recent American indie flick, 'Garden State', the ending is all too trite and tidy. The fact that Justin has only got into a New York college by lying about his parents' mental condition on his application form is conveniently swept under the carpet - or is the point that everyone is mentally ill to some extent, so he hasn't actually lied? I'm not sure.

Either way, it's well worth seeing.

Incidentally, as we filed out of the auditorium, who should we encounter outside in the lobby waiting for the private 8.30pm screening of the film but Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan aka Dalziel and Pascoe. Do all TV police / detective double-acts go everywhere together, we wondered. Alas, Morse and Lewis were nowhere to be seen in The Crown, and The Anchor probably isn't the sort of establishment you'd find Rosemary and Thyme.

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