An eye-catching but mostly empty package

Rating: 4/10 (30 September 2001)

What do we have here? Good direction, interesting cinematography, effective incidental music. The acting, while good, wasn't as impressive as most critics seemed to think. Kevin spacey appeared to be reprising his role from The Ref, a movie Annette Bening seemed to have watched for pointers from Judy Davis. One can find performances of this quality in any good television drama.
But when the clever surface is stripped away, what remains is a string of more 60's countercultural clichés than any single movie has strung together in quite a while. We have Hollywood's standard picture of suburbia, with trim lawns and expensive furniture hiding a maelstrom of perversion and misery. (I live in suburbia, and don't know people like this.) There is the henpecked Dad (Spacey), who works in the movies' ultimate symbol of phoniness, advertising. His wife (Bening) is in real estate sales, in a town where the housing market is dominated by a handsome but shallow, money-grubbing capitalist and womanizer. The only "real" human characters are their geeky, sensitive daughter and the geeky, sensitive boy next door, with whom the movie's sympathies obviously lie. And what does the boy do to finance his postmodern works of video art? He sells pot, and lies to his father about virtually everything. But that's okay, Dad is an ex-Marine who loves guns, collects Nazi memorabilia, beats his son, drives his long-suffering wife to insanity, and hates fags. Of course, he really is a fag--we all know homophobia is just a mask for latent homosexuality. As to guns, they are naturally only of interest to nut cases with sex problems, including Real Estate Mom, who is driven to obsessive target shooting by the end of the movie. And in a way, the movie revolves around the daughter's best friend, the canonical cheerleader who seduces her friend's Dad, and otherwise wallows in sluttiness.
How does Dad transcend this, get his life back, and become a truly sympathetic character? By smoking dope with the kid next door, blackmailing his boss, getting a new job flipping burgers, buying the Camaro he always wanted, and basically turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.
This all would have worked had it been satire, and I suppose some might claim that it is, but it didn't come across that way to me. Despite the semi-comedic histrionics of Spacey and Bening, the movie rarely seemed to be going for comedy, or even wit, let alone satire. But to minds who share the prejudices of its writers--which is to say, an awful lot of people in and around the movie biz--I can see how this stuff must seem awfully daring and profound.