'The Skeleton Twins': Skidding siblings deal with suicide, sometimes comically
Take two Saturday Night Live alums - Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig - and cast them as estranged siblings who rediscover their commonality, and the melancholy at their core, and you've got the odd, oddly appealing The Skeleton Twins.
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Take two Saturday Night Live alums - Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig - and cast them as estranged siblings who rediscover their commonality, and the melancholy at their core, and you've got the odd, oddly appealing The Skeleton Twins.
If a movie with suicide as a central theme can be deemed funny, then writer/director Craig Johnson has pulled it off, mixing heartache and humor and giving Wiig, especially, the opportunity to shine. She's Maggie, married to the indefatigably upbeat Lance (Luke Wilson), and while she puts on a good game face, in truth she's miserable.
The couple's house, upstate from New York City, is Martha Stewart cozy, and Lance thinks they're trying to have a child to make the place, the marriage, even more perfect. But Maggie's secretly on birth control, and soon she's off having an affair - with her scuba instructor.
When she gets a call from an L.A. hospital telling her that her twin brother Milo, a struggling actor she hasn't seen in 10 years, has tried to kill himself, she heads out there - and persuades him to come home to recuperate, get it together. Milo, once there, heads straight for the bookstore where he knows his old high school English teacher (Modern Family's Ty Burrell) works. A closeted gay man, he had seduced his student years earlier - a relationship that still haunts Milo.
The suicide of their father similarly looms over everything the brother and sister do.
The Skeleton Twins, then, is this close to turning into some kind of ersatz Eugene O'Neill. But Johnson finds the irony and the absurdity in situations. He even shoves Hader and Wiig into a room and turns on a cheesy pop anthem (Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now"). The actors dance and lip-sync and stare into each other's eyes - and they get away with it. Sure, it's too cute, but it's too good a moment, too cathartic, to ignore.
The Skeleton Twins *** (Out of four stars)
Directed by Craig Johnson. With Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Luke Wilson, Ty Burrell. Distributed by Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions.
Running time: 1 hour, 33 mins.
Parent's guide: R (profanity, sex, drugs, adult themes).
Playing at: select area theaters.EndText
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