Anomiville, USA

Rating: 9/10 (24 October 2006)

You can probably count on your fingers the number of successful above-average films that have been made about surburban life. ("Lolita" is one. "No Down Payment" is not.) Excluding the ones in which the house is taken over by a gang of rapist thugees or whatnot. There used to be a genre called suburban literature (John Cheever, etc.) but whatever visual potential the milieu of No Problem Drive may have had was drained by TV serials.
Here, on the other hand, is a movie about exactly that kind of dull life, centered about mortgages and SUVs, that succeeds in almost all respects, from comic (the first half) to dramatic (the last half).
I found it touching when it was released and figured, well, one viewing was enough, but seeing it again has only deepened my respect for the film and the people behind it.
Truth, goodness, and beauty -- such rarely found commodities among the wisteria and the rose bushes and the asphalt driveways and the dinner china from Hitler's table. The dinner china from HITLER'S TABLE? Yes, it's true. The Marine colonel (Chris Cooper) who moves in next door to the Burnhams (Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening) has such a platter locked up with the guns in his display cabinet. You can't tell what it is just by looking at it. You have to turn it over. On the bottom there is no sign of the manufacturer, just a small, simple Swastika.
The whole story is kind of about that. When you turn the pretty glistening object over -- well, you'd better not.
The performances are uniformly good. Kevin Spacey is outstanding. And Chris Cooper as the counterfeit colonel is especially good in a strictly dramatic role, with his military haircut and his traitorous rheumy eyes. I don't know why they had to make him a Marine though. Never in history has there been a gay marine. Well, except maybe for Ed Wood, who landed under fire on Pacific beaches during the big war while wearing a pair of panties under his uniform. But technically even he was a transvestite. Why couldn't they have put him in the Navy? All those months at sea? And no women? Cooper may turn out to be an abusive father, a homosexual, and a murderer, but you feel sorry for the guy anyway when he has to come to terms with himself. In fact there isn't a soul in this movie for whom you don't feel at least some pity. That's a feat in itself. A movie with no one-dimensional heavies. Only one gunshot fired in anger -- and off screen. And only two sex scenes -- one comic and the other unfulfilled.
The story is well written and well photographed. (Lots of memorable tag lines.) One of those empty plastic little bags that junk food is carried in, dancing around in a breeze, with its chorus of tannin-colored fall leaves.
Not that it doesn't have its weaknesses. What movie is perfect? The transition from comedy to drama is deftly handled but some of the character development seems rather abrupt and over-edited. Mena Suvari, as the empty-headed narcissistic 17-year-old is told she is "ordinary" by a boy her age. She calls him a psycho freak and storms out of the room, "weirded out." She's correct in calling him freaky. I don't believe he blinks once in the entire movie. But, okay, so someone she despises has told her she's ugly and ordinary. She's angry and dismissive. And yet the next time we see her (in a romantic moonlit living room with Spacey) her eyes are watering and she has undergone an epiphany. "I can't stand being ordinary," she tells Spacey before yielding her virginity to him, or trying to. Spacey has his own epiphany when he finds out she's unsullied. He has visions of roses, of majestic vistas, of San Quentin.
And I guess I can't see why the movie sets us up for having Bening murder Spacey and then turning the task over to someone else. And maybe the overhead shot after the killing looks a little like "Taxi Driver." And I suppose having the narration by a dead man reminds one of "Sunset Boulevard." And the final voice-over by Spacey, about how the last second of life lasts forever and consists of memories of boyhood and husbandhood and fatherhood are a little corny. Granted some of the characters are hackneyed and all are overdrawn, but consider how unpromising the material was to begin with, as if Mozart had written a particularly difficult sonata to be played on partly filled wine glasses.
But that's minor stuff. This is a good movie. Lots of pop songs from the early 70s if you're into that.