Igby Goes Down
Directed by Burr Steers.
Stars Kieran Culkin, Claire Danes, Susan Sarandon & Ryan Phillippe.
[This review should be read in conjunction with 25th Hour.]
Igby Goes Down is also set in New York — also, presumably post-Sept. 11, as evidenced by multiple cityscape shots in which the World Trade Centre is notably absent. While Monty Brogan in 25th Hour was at the end of his drug-dealing career, Igby Slocum (Kieran Culkin) is at the beginning of his own, selling dope to NYC’s upper-crust. However, unlike Monty, who was driven (at least partially) by economic necessity, Igby’s brief excursion into the criminal underworld seems more like an act of rebellion against the wealthy milieu into which he was born.
Essentially, Igby Goes Down is an extended, episodic riff on this idea — the teenage Igby sparring, mostly verbally, against the suffocating, stagnant upper-class, especially as embodied by his mother (Susan Sarandon). In this way, the film resembles Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) and Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tennenbaums (2001) — without, I should say, the former’s sheer causticity and the latter’s formalistic and technical playfulness.
However, Igby Goes Down is pretty good — it’s just a little too loosely structured and circular to really hit the mark. It’s not very long, but it felt like it. Burr Steers, who wrote and directed it, was previously best known as the character ‘Flock of Seagulls’ in Pulp Fiction (1994). However, on the strength of Igby Goes Down, he’s clearly a film-maker with potential. Like 25th Hour, the film features an impressive and eclectic cast, and the characterisations are what carries it; Culkin (yes, Macaulay’s younger brother) holds it all together in a tricky role, and it’s great to see talented actors like Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum away from films like Independence Day (1996).
All in all, Igby Goes Down is smart and pretty funny — but hopefully a prelude to even smarter and funnier films from Burr Steers.
Brenton Priestley
