Things Are Tough All Over

It was in the New York Times, and it didn’t have Jayson Blair’s name attached to it, so it must be true. Apparently, America’s newest put-upon minority group in the vast national mosaic of put-upon minority groups is — wait for it — the idle rich, inheritors of vast sums of money from their parents, and feeling more than a little guilty about it. “Money may be many things to many people,” saith the oh-so-sincere Times reporter, “but it is never neutral. Americans in particular seem uncomfortable with the notion of having “enough” money; there is only too little and, for a growing minority, too much. Having too much may solve certain problems, but it tends to create others, some of them purely emotional.”

Oh, the horror! Oh, the anguish! Oh, the heartbreak! Just imagine what life would be like if this would happen to you! Unthinkable! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “New wealth also presents the practical issue of fending off the multitude of opportunists, speculators and hustlers who would gladly be your new best friend for, oh, just a 1.5 percent commission,” the Times reminds us. Imagine!

(Do not worry, there is, thankfully, a support group — “More Than Money” — out there so that all these poor lost souls can help themselves.)

In the meantime, here I sit, in a basement apartment in Atlanta, eating peanut butter sandwiches, trying to scrape together enough money each week to maybe see a $6 matinee at the Landmark Midtown, waiting for the Gray Lady to point out the tragic plight of third-generation Czech-Americans or Texan expatriates or civil rights lawyers instead of focusing on the extreme mental tension of our nation’s new heirs and heiresses.

And I get to review Igby Goes Down today. Imagine my delight.

Igby Goes Down is, of course, about the Idle Rich, about a scion of a fashionably social Power Couple on the loose, cutting a swath through the prep school universe and summer beach houses at the Hamptons and trendy artsy-fartsy lofts in SoHo with hot-and-cold running starlets. Kieran Culkin (yes, from that family) is Igby, our anti-hero, seventeen years old, footloose and fancy free, skating by on looks and family money and attitude. He’s been kicked out of every Protestant prep school on the East Coast and is starting on the Catholic circuit. He’s lazy, pseudo-intellectual, vain, and stuck-up. He is, in every sense of the words, a spoiled brat. And the movie is all about him and his various sexual exploits and concomitant heartaches, and about how tough it is to be a wealthy teenager in Manhattan.

You can just imagine what I, as a proud graduate of Grand Prairie High School (”Home of the Fighting Gophers”), scholarship student, and wage slave to the Student Loan Marketing Association, made of all this. Which is to say, not much. If that.

The best way — perhaps the only way — to enjoy, or at least appreciate Igby Goes Down is in context, preferably in relation to a film like the dull and preachy All Or Nothing, about the essential worthlessness and pointlessness of the lives of a family of South London yobbos. Things are tough all over in both movies, but given the contrast between Igby’s wealth and advantages (not to mention close physical proximity to Clare Danes and Sweet Amanda Peet) and the pit that the British cabbies find themselves in only reveals how shallow and supercilious that Igby Goes Down actually is.

To be fair — against my better judgment, mind you — Igby Goes Down has a fair share of life’s little horrors. Igby’s mother is Susan Sarandon, which, come to think of it, would be grist for a wide and diverse array of psychiatric mills. His father is Bill Pullman, who quite understandably develops a mental illness as a result of having both Sarandons and Culkins in the house. (Pullman actually comes up with a very understated, brave, and vulnerable performance, maybe the best thing in the film.) Igby’s rich and overbearing godfather (no, not that kind of Godfather) is Jeff Goldblum, who is not playing a painfully geeky part, and is therefore worse than useless.

From most perspectives — certainly from my parochial, lower-middle-class, East Texas movie critic perspective — Igby Goes Down is essentially a waste of time and money and attitude, snide and snarky and pretentious. And yet, there’s still a tiny kernel of hope to recommend it, even if ever-so-slightly. That is Kieran Culkin, who against all odds turns out a smart, edgy, and downright decent performance as Igby. Culkin turns his character into what is basically an anti-Harry Potter — right down to the Gryffindor scarf — small, bookish, but able to use his magical powers to get both Amanda Peet and Claire Danes in the sack, not to mention free rent in a trendy Manhattan loft. And yet, amazingly, we never hate Igby, we never really grow tired of his amazing luck and childish antics, we secretly hope that he won’t grow up to be just another rich jerk in a suit. Igby Goes Down works, to the very narrow extent that it does, in fact, work, because Culkin is subversive enough to make it work.

Still and all, I didn’t like it, and if that is just class prejudice talking, then so be it. You can like what you like and I’ll like what I’ll like, and we’ll say no more about it.

(And, just to let you know, I just happen to really like peanut butter sandwiches, and if a basement apartment in Midtown Atlanta was good enough for Miss Peggy Mitchell when she was writing her little book, it’s good enough for me. You’re not going to hear me complain, no sir.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 30th, 2006 at 8:30 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.