Skeleton Twins (2014)
When we see Saturday Night Live's Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig on the same poster, we assume we're in for a laugh; add Ty Burrell from Modern Family and Luke Wilson, prominently featured in his brother Owen's scripts co-written with Wes Anderson, and we expect hilarity abounding. Yet one of the things the film behind that poster, The Skeleton Twins, gets right is that it lets stars otherwise known for comedy the opportunity to exercise dramatic chops. It's easy to confuse different or surprising with good, so The Skeleton Twins is generating buzz for being one of those wry indie dramas that feels like real life. Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Director and co-writer Craig Johnson has an intriguing premise - depressed sister takes in a suicidal brother to help put him back together. She's married to the perfect guy, kind and attentive; but she's not happy, trying to prick herself out of the numbness with scuba diving lessons or whatever comes around. The hook is to reunite brother and sister after ten years' silence, when both of them are experiencing personal crises (one an immediate suicide attempt, the other a slow-burning self-immolation); let them work through their stuff, the returning stranger connecting with old wounds, the one who stayed behind looking at the detritus of what their life has become. It's intriguing, though not original—a few years ago, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney did something similar in The Savages, and the brother-sister pair who are closer to each other than anyone else is not exactly uncharted territory in fiction.
The Skeleton Twins offers, sometimes, an innovative spin: I don't think I've seen a character be informed of another's near-suicide at the very moment they are about to do the same thing, and the relationship between Hader and Burrell's character is trying to get at something difficult and painful, and to do so with compassion. But the container built around these relationships isn't substantial enough to hold them; you can't build a credible story on quirk alone, and often it feels like the film is sketching the outline of ideas rather than exploring them. The emotional climax squanders the goodwill these lovely actors attract by introducing a coincidence that is both absurd and negates its moral force. It's trying be born as a good film, but hasn't grown beyond being a skeleton of itself.