Sleazy characters abound

Rating: 3/10 (11 February 2006)

What a colossal disappointment. This film has no redeeming qualities for me and I am astonished that this is considered to be an Academy Award-winning effort. It's a profoundly cynical and sleazy look at a suburban family and their various dysfunctional interactions with each other and their friends and neighbors. The only character who seemed like a halfway decent person once you got beneath her veneer of worldliness was the daughter, played by Thora Birch. The screenplay is obsessed with gratuitous profanity and a strange and somehow puerile fixation on masturbation. These are shallow characters at best, reprehensible and amoral at worst. Particularly during the second half, this became somewhat reminiscent of Blue Velvet, the David Lynch film, without the grotesqueness. Some of the dialog was stilted and absurd. Hasn't the theme of suburban alienation been attempted before and with greater success?