dvd of the week
Skeleton Twins, a dark comedy about two siblings haunted by their father’s suicide and their own failure to love the right person, was one of Sundance’s big hits this year, and it deserved the hype. The film opens with Milo (Bill Hader) drunkenly attempting to commit suicide with a razor and a bathtub and his sister Maggie (Kristen Wiig), with whom he had not spoken in 10 years, getting the call from the hospital just before she is to take a handful of pills. Milo agrees to leave Los Angeles and come stay with her and her husband Lance (Luke Wilson) in upstate New York. Milo, a waiter and failed actor, is arch, sarcastic and gay, and he finds Maggie and Lance’s cutesy, weirdly earnest marriage eye-rollingly ridiculous. Maggie, an awkward dental hygienist who suffers her sadness in silence, is secretly taking birth control pills while Lance thinks they’re trying to get pregnant and taking classes to meet other men, to, it seems, feel something strong and wrong. While Maggie tries to keep it all together, Milo starts working for Lance and visiting an old boyfriend (Ty Burrell), who is very confused about his feelings for Milo. The action is split between Milo and Maggie’s messy searches for love and fulfilment and their haphazard reconciliation. They have hilarious bonding sessions (one of which includes the best use of a Starship song in four decades) and horrible fights, they reveal and resurface secrets and wounds, and they fumble toward epiphanies. The acting is splendid, but Craig Johnson and Mark Heyman’s screenplay is the real star of the film. But Johnson and Heyman balance the humor and pathos perfectly, Wiig and Hader the lines and the scenes to create something beautiful, surprising and moving.
