Also this issue:

Sing a Song of Struggle
Lee Hirsch talks about his 10 years documenting African freedom songs.
-Sam Adams

Dogme Dog
Open Hearts breaks the vow and twists your arm.
-Sam Adams

New

Continuing

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

Repertory Film

Showtimes

March 6-12, 2003

movies

Junk Bonds

The hand that robs the cradle: Patricia Clarkson plays

a woman in love with a young aspiring rock star in

<i>The Safety of Objects</i>.

The hand that robs the cradle: Patricia Clarkson plays a woman in love with a young aspiring rock star in The Safety of Objects.

In The Safety of Objects, stuff binds people together.

by Cindy Fuchs

Objects seem safe. Unknowing and un-needy, they absorb desires and ask nothing in return, accommodating by definition. That's why you brush your doll's hair, trick out your car, frame your art. You can love your objects without fear of rejection. Or so you think. Rose Troche's The Safety of Objects, which she adapted from A. M. Homes' short stories, suggests otherwise. Here, objects offer only temporary respite, and when you realize they can't sustain the illusion of safety, the drop-off is devastating.

To make this rather obvious point, The Safety of Objects offers a series of disturbing relationships between humans and their chosen objects, most obsessive or destructive, all selfish and heedless. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these relationships fester in a suburban neighborhood, where folks have too much time and space, too many objects around them. In this, the movie resembles other recent 'burb breakdowns, from Ang Lee's somber The Ice Storm and any of Todd Solondz's increasingly grim visions to the portentous American Beauty and the soapy Life as a House.

Much like these films, Safety features a range of characters, across four families, harboring a lot of secrets. Lawyer Jim Train (Dermot Mulroney), for example, is passed over for a promotion and walks out, explaining his sudden appearance back home as the result of a "bomb threat." (The terrorists have won when they serve as an excuse for this self-indulgent dweeb.) When he suspects that his wife, Susan (Moira Kelly), is having an affair (and feels pressured by her request for a new dishwasher), Jim resets his own sights on a great big object -- an SUV being given away by a radio station.

When he finds that he's too late to enter the contest (one of those keep-one-hand-on-the-vehicle-till-all-others-drop deals), Jim picks a likely winner, Esther Gold (Glenn Close). She's in the contest at the urging of her daughter, Julie (Jessica Campbell), who doesn't want the car so much as she wants her mom to get it for her. Julie's reason for being needy is obvious; for months, Esther has been spending all her time attending to another object, Julie's comatose brother, Paul (Joshua Jackson). Glimpsed in flashbacks that lead, slowly, to the car accident, once-aspiring rock star Paul now lies hooked up to tubes and gauges, still and unchanging. For Esther, perversely, this makes him safe to love. He'll never leave her, never get in trouble worse than what he's in now.

Paul is the film's most excruciating object, and his vegetative state -- so resonant and so relentless -- affects everyone. As Esther makes him the focus of her desperate devotion, Julie and his father (Robert Klein) withdraw in horror and guilt, and his girlfriend, Annette (Patricia Clarkson), feels herself the object of everyone's accusations. She's not wrong, especially when it comes to the girls who had crushes on Paul, now checking out his coma-penis under the covers and watching Annette through her bedroom window, across the yard.

The film's objects continue to accumulate. Annette's daughter, Sam (Kristen Stewart), is bravely tending to her autistic sister (Haylee Wanstall), enduring her mom's moodiness and drinking, and her dad's astonishing selfishness (he comes to visit only to announce that he's marrying his decidedly unmaternal younger girlfriend). Sam focuses her energies on basketball and her best friend Sally (Charlotte Arnold), daughter of Helen (Mary Kay Place). But she's been turned into another sort of object by the local gardener, Randy (Timothy Olyphant), himself mourning a terrible loss and increasingly fixated on Sam, not for her, but for what he projects onto her.

For all the objectification and distraction going on in The Safety of Objects, one relationship does stand out. Taking a cue from his frustrated father, Jim, young Jake Train (Alex House) has found the ideal target for his energetic adoration, a Barbie-type doll named Tani (voiced by Guinevere Turner, star of Troche's first film, Go Fish). Technically, she belongs to his sister, Emily (Charly Chalom), but whenever Jake has a chance, he takes her away for a bit of kissy-face and lustful chatter.

The film tends to offer these stolen moments as a kind of dire comedy, as when, in a family restaurant scene, he takes Tani under the table to converse, as his fellow diners look on in some distress. Jake is, of course, emulating behavior he's seen elsewhere -- his father for instance, treating girls like objects so that he needn't trouble himself with their feelings or needs. Jake also reflects most everyone in this neighborhood, and, the film implies, the extended community of self-involved individuals that comprises the 'burbs. This makes his story funny, if you're feeling superior, and tragic, if you're feeling sympathetic. In any case, if you're feeling anything for someone who's not you, you're a step ahead.