Derick Martini's "Lyme Life" embodies and fulfills the standard requirements of an indie film's debut: overtly eccentric supporting characters, a coming-of-age narrative and a love interest.
Set in the 1970s on Long Island, N.Y., Sundance and Toronto International Film Festival favorite "Lyme Life" follows the trials and tribulations of Scott Bartlett (Kieran Culkin), a na've 15-year-old boy navigating through the climatic waves of puberty, high school and the troubles plaguing his home. Scott's father, Mickey (Alec Baldwin), is a wealthy real estate developer who works on a new, modern-style suburban community project by day and sleeps around by night. Jill (Jill Hennessy), Scott's mother, stays strapped in the house with an unhappy marriage while she watches her workaholic, womanizing husband gallivant around town.
Jimmy falls for the girl next door, literally - the elusive, older Adrianna Bragg (Emma Roberts) - yet finds his awkward attempts at wooing her futile. The Bragg family is in turmoil as well and their strife is ironically connected to the Bartlett's. Adrianna's unemployed father Charlie (Timothy Hutton) is infected with Lyme disease and often retreats to smoke joints and escape his dismal reality while his wife, Melissa (Cynthia Nixon), refuses to watch her husband crumble and seeks solace in a not-so-subtle affair with Mickey.
Rife with domestic dysfunction, surprising spells of violence and dark humor, "Lyme Life" is a mixed bag of sorts. The film's charm lies in its retro setting - a simpler time period devoid of the potent influence of mass media. Martini tackles a gamut of complex themes but often struggles in juggling the mix. Even though the ensemble cast is uniformly excellent - Hutton and Hennessy in particular - Martini often spends too much time reiterating the banality of high school life or the embarrassing nature of puppy love, ignoring the more fascinating components of the story.
The most intriguing character in the film is surely Charlie, whose subplot is accompanied by a static hum to represent the maddening headaches caused by Lyme disease. He tells Melissa that he has interviews downtown each week but often opts to stay at home and stare at a blank television screen or roam the woods with his rifle to practice shooting deer while hallucinating. These scenes are the most haunting and poignant of the film, for Charlie's hallucinatory, distorted perspective heightens the alienation and loneliness of suburbia.
With a little less time spent on the teens and a larger dose of Charlie and Jill, Martini could have knocked this out of the park; though for a directorial debut this is solid work. Then again, with both the film's cast and Baldwin and Martin Scorsese as producers, there is no reason why it should not be. "Lyme Life" is a quirky entry in the ever-increasing catalogue of suburban dysfunction drama that gracefully exposes the shoddy infrastructure of the American dream.
You can reach this staff writer at thescene@theeagleonlne.com.
