Thumbsucker is not this year’s Napoleon Dynamite — gosh!
While both movies are ostensively about a quirky teen outsider, they’re different species in terms of style, tone and intent. In Napoleon terms, it’s like comparing ligers to tigers.
Dynamite, the pop culture sensation, was as emotionally stunted as its geek icon.
Thumbsucker isn’t as chilly or hysterical an oddity — although it does feature Keanu Reeves in an amusing riff on his Matrix mumblings as a psychobabble-spouting orthodontist — and will suffer by comparison from those expecting another Dynamite satire.
Thumbsucker takes itself — and its digit-devouring protagonists plight — seriously to mixed if moving results.
As Reeves points out, sucking your thumb is a substitute for your mother’s nipple.
At times, Thumbsucker feels like a substitute for a better movie.
Lou Pucci plays Justin Cobb, the titular 17-year-old. Naturally his peculiar habit is a metaphor — thumb-sucking as a manifestation of mental illness and feelings of inadequacy.
As we’ve come to expect in movies like this, Justin’s suburban home life is a chilly study in conformist dysfunction — whether it’s his father (Vincent D’Onofrio), a failed football hero, or his mother (Tilda Swinton), an unhappy woman addicted to fantasy.
(Justin fears she will leave her family.)
Things get better — and worse — after he’s diagnosed with attention-deficit-disorder and, Tom Cruise be damned, put on Ritalin.
The result stuns — and then disturbs — his debate-team coach (a subdued Vince Vaughn) when Justin goes from sap to sociopath.
Ultimately the movie — written and directed by Mike Mills from Walter Kirn’s novel — concludes normalcy itself is an illusion and that’s something no amount of hypnotherapy or drugs can solve.
It’s hardly a profound insight, but the film is well-executed and well-acted and therefore recommended, thumbs and all.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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