The Safety of Objects

REVIEW
From its brilliant opening credit sequence, in which the cast of characters is introduced in clockwork miniature, you know that Rose Troche’s latest film will be more than just another entry in the pantheon of films about ordinary suburban people living quiet lives of quiet desperation. No indeed, Troche covers this by now well-tread ground with a fresh perspective, imbuing her film with a surreal sense of otherworldliness and humor absent in such entries as American Beauty. In that opus, though a seductive sense of danger lurked beneath the veneer of lily white America, things really were all they seemed to be. In this suburbia, as based on the writings of A.M. Homes, no one really fills their appointed roles very well. To be sure, there are midlife crises and other petty banalities, but these are offset by things like illicit affairs between a single mother and a neighbor’s teenage son (who now lies in a vegetative state as a result of an accident), young boys who develop secret affairs with their sister's dolls, young girls who are more butch than their brothers and landscapers with a seemingly unhealthy regard for such tom-girls. Troche weaves back and forth between tragic past and dreaded future, at each step dipping just a bit further into her characters’ fractured lives. She has help from a brilliant all-star cast that includes Glenn Close, Patricia Clarkson, Dermot Mulroney, Moira Kelly, Mary Kay Place and Robert Klein. A bevy of able newcomers add to a landscape where characters, rather than retreating into wells of solitude, seem inexorably drawn together in search of meaning.