the end
by Douglas Messerli
by Douglas Messerli
Mark
Heyman and Craig Johnson (screenplay), Craig Johnson (director) The Skeleton Twins / 2014
The
Skeleton twins, Maggie (Kristen Wiig) and Milo (Bill Hader), in Craig Johnson’s
want-to-be likeable 2014 film of the same name, are both facing crises: early
in the film we observe the two, on opposite ends of the US, contemplating
suicide. Milo attempts to go through with it, by slitting his wrists in a
bathtub of hot water; Maggie is saved from an overdose of pills by a phone call
reporting that Milo, having survived, lies recuperating in a hospital. Although
the two have, somewhat inexplicably, not spoken to one another for ten years,
she flies to his side.
If screenwriters Johnson’s and Mark
Heyman’s story seems like an intriguing way to begin a film (its portrayal of
damaged-for-life childish adults reminds one of a rising genre beginning,
perhaps, with Zach Braff’s 2003 film Garden
State and continuing through David O. Russell’s 2012 Silver Linings Playbook), it quickly grows utterly implausible,
however, as its writers add a series of disasters and dreadful events which the
sister and brother have had to endure.
Soon after, we begin to discover that Milo
was the target of his school teacher’s sexual abuse in high school.
Fortunately, Johnson does not make this a simple, black and white matter, suggesting
that, in what is sometimes the truth, Milo not only sought out Rich, his
English teacher’s (calmly but intensely performed by Ty Burrell) attentions,
but enjoyed the elder’s attentions. And soon after he returns to his hometown,
how under his sister’s loving protection, he seeks the man out once again. We
sense the utter loneliness of Milo, who living in the wildly gay-friendly
atmosphere of southern California, has apparently found no one with whom he
could develop a relationship; and Milo’s ensuing pain, when Rich,
understandably, is terrified that his former student has returned to cause
further trouble—particularly given the facts that the former teacher, now a
bookseller, remains closeted and has a 16 year-old son—helps to reveal the
emptiness of the younger man’s life. The fact that Milo still seeks out his
elder simply reiterates his isolation, and also helps to substantiate his
feelings that, despite his visions he has had for his future, he is one of
those who has peaked in high school, never able to find something later in life
as meaningful. Although he has dreamt of a career in acting, he has not even
been able to obtain an agent and survives by working as a waiter in a Hollywood
tourist restaurant. Although the two, Rich and Milo, again begin a brief sexual
relationship, Milo is soon after rejected again by Rich after he attempts to
visit him at his home—to be greeted at the doorway by Rich’s son. After heavy
drinking, Milo once again toys with suicidal thoughts, tossing the good luck
charm of a whale (a reference to Melville’s Moby
Dick, the book in which Rich had tried and failed to interest his young
student) off the edge of a building,
from where he himself, a seemingly doomed beast, could any moment fall.
As the would-be healer of her beloved
brother, Maggie puts up a great front, pretending to be in love with her
witless, run-of-the-mill, if loveably straight-forward husband, Lance (Luke Wilson).
Yet we soon observe her courting disaster with an affair with a scuba-dive
teacher. And she soon reveals, after a nitrous oxide laughing-high (she works
as a dental hygienist) with her brother, that her current sexual escapade is
just one of many, that she has had brief affairs with other teachers (similar
in their roles if not their ages to the object of her brother’s first sexual
encounter) of various hobbyist interests she has taken up to get her out of the
house. While Lance proudly announces when he first meets Milo, that he and
Maggie attempting “to make a baby,” she now admits to Milo that she is secretly
continuing to take pills to protect her from pregnancy. What’s worse, she
suddenly discovers, is that she has forgotten to take a pill for one day, and
may have missed her period.
Although the twins’ new-found kinship
begins, understandably, as a rather rocky one, it soon becomes clear that the
two can charm and uplift one another in ways that no others can, demonstrated
spectacularly in a scene in which, Maggie having just discovered that she may
be pregnant, Milo, to cheer her up, breaks into a lip-synched song, “You Can
Count on Me,” that, with Hader’s deliciously delivered up dance steps and spins
might charm even a misanthropic cynic. Like nearly all of the actors in this
dark film, he is near perfect in his role.
When Lance admits to his house guest that
he is fearful that he may be infertile, Milo suggests that Maggie has always
been highly secretive and that, perhaps she is on some sort medication that
might explain her behavior or even her inability to get pregnant. Even if only
subconsciously, he is plotting what she will later call an act of “revenge.” Yet
we know, no matter how innocent Lance may be, in his utter cluelessness, he is
also not the right man for Maggie; and we recognize that Milo is now only doing
for Maggie what she had done for him years before. Faced with Lance’s discovery
of her birth-control pills, Maggie has no choice but to admit her bizarre
sexual behavior to her husband, ending—as she predicted— with the end of her
marriage.
Perhaps only now do we truly comprehend why
these two have not communicated for ten long years! For not only have the
Skeleton twins’ father and mother twisted their perceptions of life, but the
siblings themselves have helped to bring down one another by destroying each
other’s doomed romances. As Milo takes bus out of town, Maggie enacts her
suicide by drowning, tying herself down with barbells as she jumps into the
local pool.
It hardly matters that Milo, in response
to her suicide note in the form of a cellphone message, quite unbelievably
rushes back in time to save her just in time from drowning. She might as well
have drowned; he might as well have disappeared into the California surf. The last scene of the film shows them facing
out at the audience as a smiling couple, staring at a tank of fish, a loving
gift from Maggie to the fish-loving Milo, but we know they lives are
spiritually over, which no amount of their mother’s attempts at “cleansing” can
ever restore.
My companion Howard argues that the film
ends with the simple hope that they will now each find the right companions,
discover people who might be intelligent enough to deal with the dark and
quirky currents of their lives.
Los Angeles,
October 12, 2014
Reprinted
from Nth Position
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