One of the most honest and straightforward movies in all of 2014 saw two of the most well known Saturday Night Live alums take on roles that were very, very different from anything that we have seen them in before. Rian Johnson’s (Looper, The Brothers Bloom) The Skeleton Twins is a movie that deals with mental health, a topic that hits very close to home with me. This is one of those movies that is categorized as a hit or miss drama/comedy, but this is hardly a comedy. This isn’t the heaviest movie in the entire world, but you certainly won’t be smiling much as you empathize with the leads Maggie (Wiig – Bridesmaids, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) and Milo (Hader – Year One, Superbad). You might spend the first 15-30 minutes wondering when the comedy is coming, only to realize that maybe it not be. Best rest assured that you will know right away that this isn’t the Hader and Wiig that you know. This is something much more profound. This is a film to be seen for the film enthusiasts of the world.
The next thing I am going to say is not going to give anything away because it all happens in the first five minutes of the film. Siblings Maggie and Milo, once close, haven’t seen each other in over ten years. And over a few hours, they are both preparing to kill themselves. Milo goes through with his attempt by slitting his wrists in a bathtub while Maggie is ready to flush a handful of pills down her mouth. Both are incredibly sick individuals, and we are uncertain why (being that it is very early in the film). It is implied that Milo has just gone through a very difficult breakup by the way he painfully looks at a photo of him and a former partner (Milo is gay) before placing the framed picture in his home aquarium. Maggie’s suicide attempt is interrupted by a phone call saying that Milo attempted to take his life, but is okay. She flies to visit him and offers for him to come back to New York (where they grew up) to live with her and her husband Lance (Luke Wilson – Old School, Vacancy), where she can watch over him while he attempts to put his life back together. Their mother is still alive, but we learn in the film’s opening scene that their father is not and that he suffered from mental illness as well. One important thing to point out here is that everyone is aware that Milo attempted to end his life, but only the audience is mindful that Maggie was about to do the same thing. With her character, no one is the wiser.
We learn that Maggie and Milo are mostly good people, but they are sick, and each act out in ways that they believe will make them feel better but are cries for help. Milo is an aspiring actor but knows he has no future in the industry. He doesn’t even have an agent, and rather than pursuing roles, he waits tables at a tourist attraction restaurant. His sense of well-being seems to be influenced, in large part, to how a romantic partner views him. If there is hope/promise in that aspect of his life, everything else seems at least manageable. But when he is not romantically involved with someone, he looks frantically depressed and turns to alcohol as a way to cope. And he’s not a good drunk. He drinks shots, and he downs them quickly. This causes him to lose all inhibitions and to be a person completely different from who he is when he is sober. Maggie works at a local dentist’s office. She may be a dental hygienist or perhaps just the office manager aspiring to be a dental hygienist. That part isn’t clear. She’s married to a great guy in Lance. She knows what a great guy he is and, while she loves him, he doesn’t truly make her happy. It isn’t him who doesn’t make her happy; it’s her life. Maggie and Lance are complete opposites of one another, but it never seems like there is any fiction in the relationship. He’s a little quirky, and she doesn’t exactly see life with a cup half full mentally, but they make it work as a couple.
Nonetheless, she seeks out extramarital affairs as her way to cope with a life she that dissatisfies her. And I will say that Luke Wilson does a fantastic job in this movie as good guy Lance. He is impossible not to like from the moment we meet him until the very end, despite all of what he is forced to deal with along the way. For Milo, alcohol helps him escape the pain. For Maggie, it is sexual relationships with other men. Regardless of how they cope with the sadness and displeasure of their lives, they both feel immense regret afterward. To me, this shows that they are good people. They are flawed people. They are sick people. But they want to do the right thing, even when their actions suggest otherwise.
Rich (Ty Burrell – television’s Modern Family, Morning Glory) plays an integral part in Milo’s life that gets revisited. It is something that forces Milo to deal with. His relationship with Rich is something that makes him feel high on life one moment and ready to end it all the next. It further goes to show just how unstable Milo is. Like Wiig, Hader, and Wilson, Burrell is superb in his role. The acting as a whole is top-notch, and I would have thought it would have been recognized in some sort of Independent Spirit Awards ceremony or something like that). Maggie and Lance are trying to have a child, but Maggie confides to her brother that she’s not sure she is ready to be a mother. The strong relationship that they had growing up is slowly returning, despite setbacks along the way. Both of them lack, at times, the necessary filters of decorum. And they say things to hurt each other, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. But there is a love between brother and sister that has always been there and will always be there. Each of them wonders how they could have let ten years past without them talking. They wonder if they would be better emotionally if they had had each other during these difficult years.
Ultimately this movie is about two characters trying to live lives that they don’t always want to live and don’t always have the resources to lead successfully. There definitely could have been the incorporation of mental health professionals throughout this film, especially to Milo. The fact that he attempted suicide, but was allowed to leave the hospital two days later and leave the area without any talk of appoints with a psychiatrist was perplexing and, frankly, disappointing. Psychiatrists certainly aren’t going to help everyone, but, in this day and age, it seems like an effort should have been made on the hospital’s part, Milo’s part, or Maggie’s part to assure that he got proper care through medication and counseling. I don’t think you can commit suicide and play it off as “I was just sad.” Not anymore, anyway. The story could have still unfolded in the same way. For me, this was a missed opportunity and a vital one in that. Yet it did not take away from my enjoyment of the film or the realness of its characters.
The Skeleton Twins is not a Top 10 movie of the year, but somewhere in that 11-20 range…when all is set and done, it’ll probably be closer to 11 than 20).
Plot 8.5/10
Character Development 8/10 (I’m not sure enough gets resolved…I’m not sure the characters could have gone from where they were at the start of the movie to where they are at the end without more resources in place helping them…again I might be critical here because I know the topic very well)
Character Chemistry 9/10 (the four main actors are dynamic when on the screen with each other)
Acting 10/10 (not a movie that you would expect to see a 10 in acting from, but I thought the top four performances were excellent and that each of these was so different than anything that actor has been in before)
Screenplay 8/10 (simple, effortless, though it had its share of flaws)
Directing 8/10
Cinematography 8.5/10 (never feels like New York city, but I sort of think that was the point)
Sound 8/10 (a scene with Starship’s Nothing Gonna Stop Us that was cool, but felt slightly out of place for me)
Hook and Reel 10/10 (sold from the get-go and I never got distracted… excellent character study of its two leads)
Universal Relevance 9.5/10 (hits home for me)
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