Derick Martini's second film Lymelife is so earnest, sensitive, and well intentioned that it seems cruel to do anything but praise it. Set in 1970's Long Island, the indie drama is told through the eyes of fifteen-year-old Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin), a sensitive youth obsessed with Adrianna, the beret wearing girl next door (Emma Roberts) and disturbed by his parents' crumbling marriage (Jill Hennessy and Alec Baldwin).
Unhappy Marriages and Unwanted Tics
Martini isn't covering new territory. Ang Lee probably gets bragging rights for the quintessential film about disaffected teens witnessing their parents marital fumbles in with
The Ice Storm, with Noah Baumbach's
The Squid and the Whale in close second. To be fair, however, this is potent material, worth being told in all its awful glory over and over again -- but only if the telling is done right.
Lymelife starts with the local Long Island community panicking aboutLyme disease; Scott's mother wraps the seams of his clothes in duct tape to stop the invasion of the dreaded tic. The film, however, doesn't capture the growing desperation of its cast of characters. Instead, the emotional upheaval of one and all slowly drags to it an unexciting conclusion.
Teenage Pity Sex
Scott's melancholy mother Brenda (Hennessy) misses her native Queens. His older brother Jimmy escapes, skipping for college for the allure of the army. His rugged father Mickey (Baldwin) takes the obvious route for a handsome, unsatisfied, wealthy man: he beds another woman, Melissa (Cynthia Nixon), the unhapilly married mother of Adrianna and wife of ruined Charlie (Timothy Hutton). The two married couples fight. The teenagers retreat. Adrianna and Scott find refuge in each other's company. In a storyline that rings especially untrue, their friendship climaxes in an awkward sex scene. Adrianna, however, has already been seen lip-locked in the arms of an older guy; she has no reason to take pity on Scott.
The bad seventies haircut doesn't help the film's central character. Rory Culkin, younger brother of Macauley, has grown up, and he lacks that impish, trademark charm. In Lymelife, he makes for an unfortunate narrator; something about the flatness of Culkin's eternally dull expression makes him a difficult character to care about -- a fundamental problem since Scott is meant to be the heart and soul of Martini's sedentary film.
