Bob Balaban (1989)
This horror story, set in suburban Massachusetts in the 1950s, derives essentially from the familiar but nonetheless powerful idea that children, as they begin to think about their world, wonder what parents get up to when the kids aren’t around to see. The theme is made clear in an eavesdropping conversation between only child Michael Laemle and Sheila, his sole friend and he daughter of his father’s boss. Their families have just had dinner together and the two sets of parents are now playing cards, with a good deal of meaningful eye contact and body language. ‘What are they doing?’ asks Michael. ‘They’re changing,’ replies Sheila. ‘They change when we’re not here.’ Bob Balaban’s film bears her out: when Michael has gone to bed, his parents not only have sex – they gorge themselves on human flesh in order to get turned on. The script (by Christopher Hawthorne) and direction aren’t shaped imaginatively. Parents would be more compelling if it developed from a description of Michael’s troubled feelings about Mom and Dad’s nocturnal world – a world mysterious to the child but naturally assumed to be normal by a grown-up audience – towards revelation of the horrific particular secret of the Laemle parents, a secret which justifies Michael’s worst fears. If the story were handled in this way, we might at first see Michael as neurotic then be startled out of our complacency. Bob Balaban makes too much too sinister from the start – the wallpaper in the family’s dining room, the lighting there and in Michael’s bedroom and, especially, Randy Quaid, as Michael’s father, Nick. Although she looks as immaculate as her kitchen, even Nick’s wife Lily seems not quite right. She is played by Mary Beth Hurt, an actress who was too android for comfort even when cast as reasonably normal human beings in Interiors and The World According to Garp. Some of the images associate sex and gastronomy but Balaban doesn’t exploit the subversive potential of the material – to present cannibalism as a ghastly extension of copulation. When Michael discovers Mom and Dad having sex, the scene is plainly a red herring (although lit dazzling white: the only red is the blood staining Nick and Lily Laemle’s mouths).
Still, Parents quickly hooks you and holds your attention. Although it’s inevitably nasty, it’s fairly disciplined in its diet of shocking highlights; and if the cannibalisation of Michael’s educational psychologist is hard to stomach (because Sandy Dennis makes of this character a really likeable eccentric), the film’s ending is well judged, illustrating the undying trauma of Michael’s real-life nightmare without trying to cap it and leave you suffocated by horror running rampant. In the daylight sequences, the unreal brightness of the colours vivifies wittily and ominously the emphatic but innocuous palette of domestic movies and commercials of fifties America. (The cinematography is by Ernest Day.) Bryan Madorsky is remarkable and worrying as Michael. Looking like a profoundly glum sibling of the little boy in Mary Poppins, Madorsky both contributes to the audience’s unease and invites our sympathy. Sheila tells him she’s from the moon (and will return there once she’s completed her education) but it’s Michael whose look is so wan and alienated that he might be an extraterrestrial. It’s as if his parents’ unusual habits have begun to dehumanise their child physically yet Michael retains a capacity for emotional suffering: this is an odd, engaging combination. And Mary Beth Hurt’s mannered, artificial quality gets to be increasingly right in her role here: her deep throaty giggle, which offsets a tinny voice and neat, tight gestures, amusingly and eerily suggests Michael’s mother’s guilty secret. The physical and sensual contrasts supplied by Hurt, Juno Mills-Cockell (Sheila) and Deborah Rush (Sheila’s mother) give a peculiar, surprising edge to the Oedipal aspect of Parents: the young girl is the most maternal presence while Hurt’s pristine, almost zombified girlishness often makes her seem more like a sister to Michael than a mother. Even in his clean white shirts, Randy Quaid’s paterfamilias looks bestial and to belong to a different species from either his wife or his child. Mary Beth Hurt’s physical kinship with her son has the effect of making Mom’s corruption by Dad all the more horrifying to Michael – and poignant to the audience.
[1990s]
