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Justin Cobb (Lou Pucci) is a seventeen-year-old virgin, a highly
sensitive young man painfully aware of not fitting in. In a world where bland appearances
are everything, Justin seems somewhat at a loss to even know how to rebel and he
perambulates among the sleepwalkers of his suburban
Director Mike Mills renders such a
true-to-life vision of early twenty-first century suburbia as beige hell that the camera
work might be mistaken for simple home movies, and the generally strong acting among the
cast might easily be misinterpreted as a bunch of really cool, really big-name actors just
showing up and being themselves in front of that camera. Justin’s father, Mike
(Vincent D’Onofrio), scarcely seems mature enough to have a nearly grown son.
D’Onofrio’s character lapses into muted silences, whenever asked to give of
himself, explain himself, or otherwise indicate he ever moved beyond being seventeen
himself.
Justin’s mom Audrey (Tilda Swinton) struggles, like a little cloud
encountering buffeting wind gusts in the sky, with her own adulthood identity.
Swinton’s character in her woman-child lack of surface complication is fascinating to
watch as she finds her way to a new career as a nurse in a residential treatment program
for celebrity addicts. Mike and Audrey insist that Justin call them by their first names,
lest “Mom” and “Dad” constrict or otherwise force them to feel older
than they are comfortable with.
Director of photography Joaquin Baca-Assay must be singled out for his
remarkable cinematography. The carefully framed shots of subdivided tract-housing, the
consistent color range of muted pastels, the layer upon layer of beige and blond fences
and tracts and visual collages add up to a mind-numbingly bland and highly misleading
vision of ubiquitous normalcy, underlining the claustrophobic (but illusory) sense of
safety that suburbia is designed to inspire. Perhaps the most important character in Thumbsucker is contemporary suburbia, and
Baca-Assay renders Justin’s town into a real estate agent’s drive-by audio tour
as seen by Joel Sternfeld, a kind
of American Prospects talking book.
The bland horror motif is strengthened structurally. For example,
Justin’s debate team coach. Mr. Geary (Vince Vaughn), is a near visual double of
D’Onofrio. The vagueness of everyone’s speech is parodied by New Age
seeker-warrior, Justin’s orthodontist, Perry Lyman (Keanu Reeves), to whom Justin
turns when no one else seems capable of mentoring him. Ironically, as Lyman succeeds in
his own quest to “find himself” and become “normal,” exactly that
happens. Reeves’ primary purpose seems to be to give the audience permission to see,
and laugh at, the joke of it all.
Thumbsucker is something of
a sleeping giant of a film. Its greatly understated tone (and at time stupefying effects
of witnessing endless surface blandness) allows Mills to point out some rather hefty
elephants squatting in the middle of Americans’ living rooms today. In a society
where the easy answer to everything is a pill, preferably Ritalin, Prozac, or the latest
state-of-the-art cure-all, where specious diagnoses permit everyone to become the victim
of their faulty brain chemistry, where political debate and examining social issues have
become merely talking points for advancing oneself in the popularity contest of suburban
life, this film suggests, ever so blithely and blandly that, well, maybe there is
something terribly wrong in our nation where everyone ends up needing to be addicted to
something.
- Les Wright
