*/****
starring Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott Thomas, Hayden Christensen, Jena Malone
screenplay by Mark Andrus
directed by Irwin Winkler
by Walter Chaw Adrift in a turbid morass of such Forrest Gump-isms as, “Hindsight is like foresight without a future,” and “I like how it feels not to feel,” Irwin Winkler’s rumpled hankie of a movie Life as a House is that tired breed of awkward, self-important entertainment wherein people are always tenderly asking one another for permission to steal a kiss. There is not a moment unaffected by syrupy manipulation and severe underestimation of the audience. Worse, every major plot point in Life as a House is stolen from American Beauty, the film it most wishes to emulate and, ironically, least resembles in terms of intelligence and observation. From the doomed father’s voice-over to the Lolita love-kitten sexpot; from the wayward soccer moms to the attempts to facilitate a familial reconciliation through the discarding of a conventional 9-to-5 American dream; from the troubled young man who finds salvation in the arms of a chubby young woman to the last-minute denial of a conventional happy ending…the only thing that’s really different about Life as a House (besides the fact that it stinks) is an epilogue that uncomfortably recalls the ethic of another Kevin Spacey film: Pay It Forward.
George (Kevin Kline) lives in a ramshackle hut in the middle of a million-dollar seaside neighbourhood. A frustrated architect who has spent twenty years with his ungrateful company, he’s laid-off the same day he discovers that his mysterious loss of appetite is a ham-inducing cancer fatal to actors and sometimes their extra-curricular careers. With only about four months to live (the length of time divined by George because terminally ill people in movies like this are not only suddenly eloquent and rhapsodic, but also monkishly prescient), George forces his troubled son Sam (Hayden “The Next Anakin Skywalker” Christensen) to move out of ex-wife Robin’s (Kristen Scott Thomas, adding to her already bloated list of weepy heroines in overfed melodramas) house and into his ramshackle hut’s ramshackle garage. Why the garage? Because with the time remaining to George, he intends, with his son, to build his dream house on the picaresque lot overlooking the warm Pacific, healing the bonds between son and father and teaching us all a little about ourselves along the way.
We know that George is going to die because of his beatific glow and nagging propensity to expound at length on the sweet, ephemeral, delicate thread of life and dulcet love. We know that Robin is going to fall in love with George again because she slow dances with him one dusk under the watchful (and perversely approving) eyes of her young stepchildren. We know that Sam is bad because after Columbine, any sensitive kid listening to Marilyn Manson is guilty of being a sociopath instead of just having bad taste. We subsequently know that Sam is gonna straighten up and fly right because comely Alyssa (Jena Malone) rubs suntan lotion on his back and then inexplicably climbs into the shower with him because they’re “just friends.” (To be clear, Alyssa makes out with Sam’s dad because she’s “just curious;” she’s much too young to be George’s “friend.”)
What’s more of a mystery is just what exactly Winkler, et al., were thinking when they decided to use coerced teen homosexual prostitution and teen promiscuity without consequence as inappropriately uplifting Lifetime channel moments. Also, the surprise house-saving revelation at the end of the film stands as possibly the first mainstream cinematic example of deus ex fellatio. The lack of sensitivity put into this foundationless artifice is rivalled only by the looseness of its structure (droves of schmaltzy subplots and superfluous characters fidget around uncomfortably before apologetically slinking off-screen), the insipidness of Mark Isham’s sad oboes and violins, and the overall uncertainty about just what it is exactly that Life as a House is trying to say at any one time.
Life as a House is heartless pabulum, neither satire nor comedy nor drama nor sensible. It thinks you so desperate for entertainment that you’ll swallow any amount of syrup and happily reach for that syringe of insulin when diabetic blindness would actually be a mercy. Is there such a thing as diabetic deafness? Vilmos Zsigmond’s astonishing photography is the one saving grace of Life as a House, capturing with equal alacrity ocean sunsets and ocean sunrises. Sadly, when all’s said and done, a few lovingly crafted shots of a Witness-style barn-raising only throw the low-rent elements of the rest of the film into sharp relief. Life as a House tries for the metaphoric but would have been better served focusing its energies on not being so sophomoric.
