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Unwanted Side-Effects 

Crissa-Jean Chappell
Review of Igby Goes Down
(R) ***

“Childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.”

--Louise Bogan 

Igby Slocumb’s mother is supposed to be dead. Instead, she’s propped up on pillows and snoring like a buzz saw. Her boys—sporting prep-school blazers and matching frowns—consider the absurdity of it all. They tried knotting a plastic bag around her head, but now it’s inflating with the rhythm of her last gasps, all smeary with fuchsia lipstick. How could this unlikely trio come to such a hellish moment? The malfunctional opening of the acid-laced, indie comedy, Igby Goes Down, dissolves into a flashback narrative, revealing how Igby (Kieran Culkin), modern-day Holden Caulfield, fell into so much unwanted trouble.

It began with his family, the stiff-shirted, grim-faced people with severe hair and corseted respectability. His WASPy mother, Mimi (Susan Sarandon) treats her society-bred sons like an unwanted side effect of sex. (Igby refers to her by first-name because Medea was taken and Heinous One is a bit cumbersome.) His fogged and distant father, Jason (Bill Pullman), collapsed after a mental meltdown, driven bonkers by the pressure of privilege. His brother, Oliver (Ryan Phillippe), the affected college brat, who, according to Igby, is ''majoring in neo-fascism at Columbia,'' might share Igby’s sorrow, but doesn’t have the time or sensitivity for it. So Igby busts out of military school and takes up hiding in the Big Apple.

Naturally, a boy with Igby’s elevated sense of personal style wouldn’t hide just anywhere. He lands himself a SoHo loft, spare and white as the Himalayas, courtesy of his rich “godfather,” D.H. Baines (Jeff Goldblum), a slickster who rents the cavernous space to dancers who don’t dance and painters who don’t paint. “It’s like a boho version of the Island of Lost Toys,” says Igby, regarding the huckster-artists who camp there, including Rachel, (Amanda Peet), who’s coupling carnally with Baines. At a Hamptons party, Igby meets another “nymphomaniac pseudo-bohemian,” the vegetarian who rolls perfect joints, Sookie Sapperstein (the splendid Claire Danes). She regards herself as her parents’ “vanity project,” and Igby's unofficial girlfriend.

''His creation was an act of animosity,'' Mimi says of her son. ''Why shouldn't his life be?'' First-time writer-director, Burr Steers (who co-starred in The Last Days of Disco), says he began Igby as a novel. This shows in the film's quirky details. While every character is sketched with eyebrow-raising irony, no one comes off as two-dimensional. The tone remains comic, even when circumstances turn tragic. Culkin (recently seen as a rebellious altar boy with a dangerous life) tackles the role with perfect timing, not simply a misfit teen in another coming-of-age film, but a champion against the world’s phonies, the sort who don’t know where ducks go in the winter.

While Holden Caufield had a fear of growing up, Igby wants to get there too fast. Instead of falling from innocence, he’s trying gain it back. People always disappoint him with their insincerity. Under the surface of charm, phonies like D.H. Baines are "secret slobs" whose razors are always rusty. A telling moment occurs when Igby recalls playing hooky with his dad, sneaking off to see George Cukor’s 1938 film, Holiday, another nonconformist comedy where people have serious concerns for the ways in which they choose to live their lives. If life is a game that one plays according to the rules, Igby might disagree. If you get on the side where all the hotshots are, then it's a game. But if you get on the other side, what's so game about it?