A return to form for Solondz (Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse) with this acerbic anti-romantic comedy. Twenty-something manchild Abe lives at home with his parents (Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow), working for the family firm, and at war with himself.
Hilarious and excruciating, this broadside at family life is at once a portrait of anger, self-loathing and frustration and an excoriating indictment of middle class mores.
Abe rails against the hypocrisy he sees at the heart of his family while taking absolutely no responsibility for his own arrested development and inability to form relationships. Desperate to establish himself outside the orbit of his overbearing father and cloying mother, Abe is swept off his feet by an attractive woman who clearly has problems of her own.
Something of a throwback to Solandz’s earlier films, this focuses very much on a single character and eschews the structural games of later work like Palindromes to deliver something more accessible in style and tone. Solandz delivers his trademark eye-watering ability to punch through social niceties in spades.
