Igby Goes Down

Igby doesn't just go down -- he goes way, way down, in one of the most glorious youthful unravelings since Benjamin Braddock crashed the nuptials of his married lover's daughter and Holden Caulfield popped on a red hunting cap to tell all those phony bastards to sod off. Burr Steers' uneasy first feature intentionally recalls both of these studies in wandering discontent, although Igby (Culkin), on the lam from his umpteenth boarding school, has a slightly stronger case for rebellion than his forbears. He was born a Slocumb, the youngest in a family dynasty forged on prescription pills, sexual betrayals, and emotional sniper fire. Igby's father (Pullman) has been “recuperating from life” in the nuthouse for six years; mother Mimi (Sarandon) is a socialite shark with a bald contempt for Igby; and brother Oliver (Phillipe), a Young Republican studying economics at Columbia, is by his own admission “numb.” Or maybe Oliver just said that to get laid by the clove-smoking, quasi-boho Sookie Sapperstein (Danes), who happens to be sleeping with his little brother, too. No one here may be taken at face value: That is, everyone appears to be a monster, but, against all odds, shreds of humanity manage to claw their way through the tough hide. The simplest way to break down Igby Goes Down is to call it a black comedy, but Greek tragedy would be more on the nose. (Explaining why he calls his mother by her first name, Igby smirks that “Medea was already taken.”) Still, Igby Goes Down mines terrifically funny stuff from these warring sons and mothers. Steers' script is a mastery of one-liners (while having the grace to not feel like it) and a cutting meditation on upper-class isolation. His tight orbit of sensationally dysfunctional characters collide in the occasional sex or shared Scotch, but rarely stay in concert; one gets the sense that any prolonged attachment would be the undoing of this masochistic lot. The script serves the gosh-wow cast well -- almost everyone here is doing the best work of their career. Goldblum, as Igby's godfather D.H., is somehow vacuous and commanding at once, a slick, not unkind modern-day robber baron whom Goldblum embodies as effortlessly as his designer threads. As D.H.'s artist tart and Igby's occasional playmate, Peet is a gorgeous, broken bird hurtling toward earth with a snarl and a smack syringe under wing. (At this point, to ask if Peet steals her scenes is to pose a rhetorical question.) Too long gone, Danes is a charmer as the snappy Sookie; the actress, whose cries could stop a heart in mid-pump, is afforded but one slender sob here, and it should be hung on a wall as a minor masterpiece. If Steers were a sentimentalist, Sookie's love affair with Igby could be an Annie Hall for the new millennium. But then, this is a film in which a son has placed a plastic bag over his slumbering mother's head before the opening credits have fully unspooled, so Igby will have to get his eggs elsewhere. All told, the film is one of the finest acting showcases to come down the pike in a long while, and Culkin is the cream of the crop, improbably inspiring compassion in this indocile, roily little shit. Igby Goes Down is by no means flawless: The score is a clanging disruption, the camerawork undistinguished, the beginning disjointive, and the ending, sinking under the weight of too many mini-denouements, borders on mawkish. And yet, warts and all is fitting for a film so bent on magnifying the pockmarks of these Upper West Side wanks. Smart, uncanny, resistant to the short cuts of pop psychology, and shocking in the best since of the word, Steers' debut is a stunner.