Hader and Wiig so dark it’s funny in The Skeleton Twins.
The Notebook’s amoral Poles & The Skeleton Twins’ depressed Midwesterners,
How could something so dark be so funny? It’s a question one can’t fully answer with any certainty, but we know Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader have a lot to do with the weird and wonderful black magic that is The Skeleton Twins.
A family dysfunction comedy that actually feels fresh thanks to Mark Heyman ( Black Swan) and director Craig Johnson’s script about estranged fraternal twins, this movie inked one of the biggest deals at the Sundance Film Festival thanks to Wiig’s rising star status and boxoffice clout in the wake of Bridesmaids, but she’s only half the equation on display.
Hader proves he’s got the dramatic goods in the role of Milo, a middle aged gay man who still hasn’t found happiness. When the movie opens, Milo is actually trying to kill himself to quell the pain of a recent breakup.
Little does he know, his twin sister Maggie (Kristen Wiig) is attempting the very same nihilist feat at the very same time.
Thankfully, neither one succeeds in these initial strains, but when Milo is hospitalized, Maggie finds herself resuming the role of de facto caretaker. Within a few minutes, she offers to take Milo back to her Middle America home, where she lives with her boring but safe boyfriend Lance (Luke Wilson).
Milo takes one look around his sister’s beige reality of barbecue talks and weekends in big box parking lots and he’s aghast. He can’t believe his one and only sibling has surrendered to such a banal existence, and he can’t help himself from issuing spontaneous, snarky judgment.
Suddenly he’s Oscar Wilde, sending out barbs and skewering his entire past life as it parades before him in unseen flashbacks, torturing his still-lost soul.
Milo’s moroseness is selfindulgent and in our face, but Maggie’s self-loathing is cloaked in socially acceptable camouflage: She has sex with her scuba instructor while keeping her suicidal tendencies on complete lock down.
Nobody can see Maggie’s pain except Milo, but he’s too preoccupied with his own drama to empathize with his sister’s emotional malaise, and the two inevitably get on each other’s nerves — both certain the other is being completely selfish, or entirely in denial.
As frustrating as it is to watch all this ego and self-absorbed misery, it rings entirely true. People can’t see past their own pain and get pissed off when it’s trivialized or played down by wise-ass know-it-alls who offer pop psychology salves and kitten-poster-worthy parables.
Fortunately Maggie and Milo have the same disdain for psychobabbling self-improvement types, and once we meet the Botox pin cushion they call a mother (Joanna Gleason), we know why.
The family reunion sequence may be one of the strongest scenes
It moves from slapstick to drama to absurdist square dance
in the whole film because it moves from slapstick to drama to absurdist square dance with each new beat and shows the dramatic dexterity of the two leads, who ricochet off the other with lethal force.
They are both so solid at the deeper stuff, it makes you think Hollywood should look to comedians more often because unlike their “serious” counterparts, who suck the lens dry looking for affirmation, Wiig and Hader have no problem looking unsympathetic or ugly.
They know the route to reality is laden with potholes and hairpin turns, and like Goofy behind the wheel of an old Caddy, they allow their bodies to become rubber bands, their eyeballs to roll like dice and their great big hearts to bust out of their rib cage — without appearing slapstick.
A gorgeous tag team performance that takes real life to the mat without grotesque spectacle, The Skeleton Twins turns the human struggle into universally accessible entertainment with just enough danger to keep it edgy.
The Skeleton Twins opens wide Sept. 26.