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Variety.com - Startling performances, searing dialogue and an archaeologist’s sense of late ’70s period detail power the violently funny “Lymelife.” Named, a tad regrettably, for the paranoid condition of wood-tick-fearing middle-class Long Islanders, the second feature written by the Martini brothers, Steven and first-time director Derick, gradually reveals itself as a film about the pressures and consequences of upward mobility and ordinary adolescence. Intense perfs by Rory Culkin and Alec Baldwin are standouts in a movie that brims with vivid supporting turns. Cross-generational marketing ops make “Lymelife” a solid bet for specialty distribs seeking a leaner and meaner “American Beauty.”
The Martinis’ previous screenplay, for “Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire,” showed considerable promise but not the ambitious sort on display here. Coalescing into a representative portrait of pre-Reagan change, the pair’s admittedly autobiographical film, dedicated to their late grandparents, centers on thin, 15-year-old bully magnet Scott (Rory Culkin), whose older, bulkier brother, Jim (Kieran Culkin), prepares to ship off to military duty, and whose longtime crush, Adrianna (Emma Roberts), reluctantly begins to return his timid gaze.
Two sets of parents seem to compete for dysfunctional-behavior prizes: Adrianna’s pill-popping father, Charlie (Timothy Hutton), shoots self-made targets in the woods with a rifle, dressed in suit and tie, while her uptight mother, Melissa (Cynthia Nixon), trysts in a dingy cellar with Scott’s angry-workaholic dad, Mickey (Baldwin).
Mickey’s underappreciated wife, Brenda (Jill Hennessy), duct-tapes her youngest son from head to toe to protect him from Lyme disease. Periodic cutaways to wandering deer and the real or imagined threat of wood ticks — not to mention scenes of believably harsh marital bickering — serve the pic’s point that these frightened, emotionally starved people, kids included, are animals at best… [Full Story]
September 14th, 2008 at 7:52 am
Anxious to see Lymelife given all of the positive buzz surrounding this movie.