Steve Buscemi (2005)

Jim went to New York City to be a writer, paying the rent by walking dogs and working at Applebee’s.  Now he returns in defeat to his small town home in Indiana:  the closest he can get to the reality of writing are the pin-ups on his wall – famous names who, although they made the grade, committed suicide.   Jim feels he may be able to emulate these illustrious names – Hemingway is at the centre of this photomontage – in this respect if no other.  He’s so self-centredly fond of his own voice that he tells his older brother Tim – a divorced father of two, who hoped for a career with the local police but is now back working in the factory owned and run by his parents – that ‘If I were you I’d kill myself’.   The conversation takes place at the end of a school basketball game:  Tim coaches the team of kids, including his own young daughters, and in none of their league matches to date have they got any points on the board.  As Jim moans about the meaninglessness of life Tim can’t get a word in edgeways but he leaves the gym and tries to take his brother’s advice and his own life (not for the first time, we gather).  He drives his car into a tree but, like everything he and Jim do, it’s a failure.  Tim, although seriously injured, survives.

One of the nurses at the hospital where he’s taken is Anika, whom Jim met in a bar the day after his return home and with whom he had short-lived (thanks to his premature ejaculation) sex.   Jim wants to see more of Anika, even when it turns out that she’s a single mother whose young son Ben goes just about everywhere with her (including a salt-in-the wound outing for Jim to a local Applebee’s).   Anika is drawn to Jim too but she’s distressed that he wears his misery on his sleeve.  ‘What exactly is wrong with you?’ she asks.  ‘Chronic depression,’ says Jim, adding bitterly of Tim, ‘I came home to have a nervous breakdown but the bastard got there first’.  Anika is tenaciously cheerful.  At one point she gives Jim a cut-out smiley mouth to stick over the photo of Hemingway but he thinks ‘it doesn’t feel right like before’.   When she protests that it was depressing before, Jim agrees, ‘Yeah, more lifelike’.

While Tim is out of action, Jim takes over his work at the factory and the basketball coaching.  When Sally, the young men’s desperately positive-thinking mother, is arrested for shipping drugs through the factory’s FedEx account, this family disaster is also thanks to Jim – or at least to the sort-of friendship he’s formed with one of the other employees, known as Evil, who gives him recreational drugs and has persuaded Jim to open a bank account for him.   Jim feels bad about his mother’s arrest – but then he feels bad about most things.   He explains to Anika that his problem is that he doesn’t much like his family but he loves them:  he treats them shittily to express his snagged feelings, to get some distance from them.

You might wonder – as does Anika – what she sees in Jim and the answer is Casey Affleck.  His thin, whiny voice and quality of trying to withhold an inherent charm are perfect for this role.  In the early stages Jim, if he’s not actually asleep, always seems on the verge of nodding off, as if because there’s nothing worth staying awake for.  Affleck is believable as a depressive – but also as someone who’s merely fed up but aiming for real depression.  He does a fine job of delivering Jim’s pep talk to the basketball team before their final match.  His idea of inspiration is to tell them he’s a much bigger loser than the team is:  this makes you laugh but the kids are painfully baffled and concerned, especially Ben.  Affleck gives us hints of Jim’s own concern that he may become a role model for the boy.   When, near the end, he’s leaving town for Las Vegas and Anika and her son come to see him off, Jim warns Ben, ‘Don’t get too apathetic – at least not until your teens’.  Affleck has an even better moment in this sequence when, as he prepares to go from the waiting area to his bus, Jim takes a deep breath that sounds as if he’s summoning courage to speak his mind.  Then he says, ‘Bye’.

As Anika, Liv Tyler has a lovely openness:  it’s a difficult role because Anika is written to be the bringer of joy into Jim’s glum world but Tyler makes her expansively individual.  She’s highly skilled at conveying, subtly but clearly, the differences in the emotional register of Anika’s equally friendly conversations with the bedridden Tim (who thinks she fancies him) and Jim (who’s quickly jealous of how nice she is to his brother).  Mary Kay Place plays Jim’s mother with great accuracy and sympathy:  her slight resemblance to Bette Midler is almost a relief – without it, what the hapless Sally has to endure would be hard to take.  Just how much Sally cheerfully infantilises her sons – Tim is her ‘big baby’ and Jim her ‘pretty boy’ – is clear from an early stage.  Jim, just home, is taking a bath – his mother takes in some towels then bends over the bath tub to hug him.  Rather than reciprocating the hug, he arranges his hands strategically.  When, later on, Sally asks him where she and her husband Don went wrong that both boys have turned out so unhappy, Jim replies that he thinks some people just shouldn’t have kids.   Mary Kay Place’s still smiling devastation as she flinches and absorbs this is piercing.  The remark is pretty typical of Jim.  He likes to think he feels compelled to be truthful yet, in this same exchange with Sally, when she first enters the room and asks what he’s doing, he’s watching porn:  he hurriedly switches off the video and tells her he’s writing.  Once the harsh words are out, he knows he’s hurt his mother but then he can feel good feeling rotten about this.

Sally’s husband Don is as consistently pessimistic as she is upbeat – although one of the very best moments of Seymour Cassel’s superb portrait comes when Jim is making his father feel so gloomy that even Don puts on a sunny face and cheerful voice for the benefit of his wife and, you feel, to thwart his son.  Anika’s son Ben is played by Jack Rovello, unforgettable as the little boy in The Hours and still remarkably miniature when he made this film three years later (when he was eleven years old).  He’s a little more self-aware here but he’s still fluid and he has both expert timing and real emotional depth.  Kevin Corrigan as Tim and Mark Boone Junior as Evil have fewer opportunities to make much of their characters but they both do well.

Steve Buscemi handles the cast impeccably but there’s more to Lonesome Jim than the acting.  The sequences in the factory and the domestic details at the family home seem very right; the flat, colour-drained landscape is unassertively expressive; and there are some highly effective motifs.  The story takes place during the days just after Christmas:  the decorations hang on stubbornly but, each time we see them, they look more forlorn.  I liked the repeated shots of basketballs failing to meet their target – until the moment when Jim, alone in the gym after he’s just rejected Anika, distractedly throws a ball and the basket he scores ironically confirms the cock-up he’s made of the relationship.   His recurring drinks of water work well too.  When he first arrives home Jim says he’s dehydrated and just about the extent of his altruism is, on visits with his parents to Tim in hospital, to say ‘I’m getting some water – anyone want anything?’   As he prepares to leave town, he makes abortive efforts to get bottled water out of a vending machine at the bus station.   Ben has another go after Jim has departed and succeeds where he failed.   Jim, meanwhile, has second thoughts, gets off the Greyhound and runs after Anika’s car, with Ben yelling at his mother to stop.   When Jim gets into the passenger seat, the boy hands him the bottle of water from the back.

The excellent screenplay is by James C Strouse; I don’t know how autobiographical it is but suffice to say that Strouse shares not only his first name but his home town – Goshen, Indiana – with his protagonist, and Tim’s daughters are played by Strouse’s own.  Since Lonesome Jim, he’s written two pictures, which he also directed:  Grace is Gone (2007), about a widower with two daughters; and The Winning Season (2009), which (according to IMDB) is ‘A comedy centered on a has-been coach who is given a shot at redemption when he’s asked to run his local high school’s girls basketball team’.

This film about being miserable is often very funny but you still yearn for things to turn out right.  Buscemi and Strouse judge very well how good things can reasonably get in the circumstances:  in the final basketball match, Ben scores the opening basket – it’s a euphoric moment for us as well as him, even though the final score is 28:2 to the other team.   But then we do get a happy ending, when Jim decides against leaving for Las Vegas.  This sounds like a copout and, with Jim chasing after Anika and Ben’s car, it rather looks like one too.  Yet the actors are so secure in their characters that it feels true.  The whole relationship between Jim and Anika is so unexpected to them both that you think – and can believe that they think – that stranger things have already happened.

21 January 2011