Two suburbanites battle out their respective "dreams" while their kid take the brunt of their failures.

Rating: 6/10 (24 June 2011)

As someone wrote earlier, this film was indeed overrated. I'm not even sure why, except that it skewers the materialism, complacency and (via Chris Cooper's wacko character) the growing (and eerily prophetic) growth of homophobia (amongst gays themselves--how weird is THAT?) as well as militant "activism" and repression which foreshadows the insanity of "The Tea Party" (GOD! I hate that stupid name, which betrays all that the Sons of Liberty held sacred!).
Anyway, we have a midlife crisis (no big deal--nothing new) but in BOTH parents? That's news. The wife, rather than "find herself" through pottery or the ubiquitous "Wimmin's groups", she nudges hubby aside even before he quits his job and tries to muscle into the housing boom by emulating her Realtor guru, played with smarmy accuracy by Peter Gallagher's goofily named "Buddy Kane".
In the final analysis, no matter what Lester (Spacey) does, he can not please his wife, the Jabba the Hutt of consumerism and shallow consumption, who refuses an afternoon rendezvous w/Lester because wine might spill on their designer sofa.
Meanwhile, their funky, semi-Goth daughter, Thora Birch, is flirting with aesthetics and its purveyor, the militia-man's' son, Ricky Fits, who is being routinely abused by his secretly gay, paranoid, militant father! You can't make this stuff up...I THINK.
Despite a hefty dose of surrealism, one must wonder: how much of this does that average middle and upper-middle-class American actually believe? The answer in this film would be: "Pretty much ALL of it"! You known teenage America is in trouble and the parents have abandoned ship, when kids "rebel" by watching a home video of a plastic bag being blown around by the wind in some ersatz Chaos Theory demo! Sad...sad...sad! Didn't these kids ever see "Jurassic Park"--if they did, they would KNOW where this "chaos" stuff leads, no matter how hypnotic.
It's safe to say that none of them can win, especially the kids. The parents, with all their experience, have steamed ahead into the iceberg, like the Titanic's captain. But the kids are left on shore...watching a stupid plastic bag. This CANNOT be good.