IAM VETETO, JONATHAN MCLENDON, OLIVIA HARRIS, AND ALEXANDRA DOKE IN THE PLAYROOM


Those who get away with it and those who don't

Julia Dyer's The Playroom is a smaller, more claustrophobic version of 1970's suburbia than Ang Lee's posh, star-studded adaptation of Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, which it's been compared to, sometimes unfavorably. Though some small details may not gibe, the intimacy created by Julia and her late sister Gretchen Dyer, who died in 2009, author of the screenplay, allows for an elegant structure and a spot-on evocation of Seventies white middle-class American suburban malaise. Accept how cruel and real this story is, and you will appreciate the neatness of the telling. The unities of time, place, and action are faithfully observed. Overlapping the chronology, interspersed, is an escapist, parent-less story told to themselves by the four Cantwell children, from whose point of view all this happens. They gather in the attic playroom around a big lit candle and comment and contribute as their eldest member, the rebellious teenager Maggie (Olivia Harris) makes up the repeated and variously told tale, ripe with wish-fulfillment, of orphaned children shut in a castle who escape by jumping off the roof into the snow, then lying doggo till they're forgotten and can flee. Maggie spins the tale to younger, but deep-voiced and confidently sarcastic Christian (Jonathon McClendon); smaller, innocent Janie (Alexandra Doke); and smallest Sam (Ian Veteto). They squabble, but stick together in the iceless storm of their shaky family life.

Their mom, Donna (Molly Parker), is alcoholic, depressed, and rebellious. She puts drinking so far above homemaking there is nothing for dinner but burnt bacon and eggs and toast. Their father is Martin (John Hawkes), a lawyer (with a soul patch?), a weakling who covers up the strife and conducts a spelling bee at the dinner table, while the kids bring up the big story of the day, the capture of Patty Hearst. Donna calls her a "terrorist," but Maggie says she's "a resistance fighter" and Sam, using a word he's learned from the news story, says their parents are "brainwashed." In his admiring review Stephen Holden of the New York Times described Maggie as exuding "the pent-up rage of Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but there are no grand theatrics here at all.

The children's story is metaphorical, though jumping off the roof is a definite possibililty. The adult story is blunt and ugly and happening right there downstairs, and the kids spy on it. It's a mess of nightly partying at the house by Mr. and Mrs. Cantwell with the childless Clark and Nadia Knotts (Jonathan Brooks and Lydia Mackay). Clark Knott flirts, and worse, with Mrs. Cantwell. Nadia Knotts looks on stony-faced, and weeps. The downstairs couples party is an outwardly bland but underlyingly menacing and grim celebration of alcoholic, adulterous "grownup" anomie -- seen from a certain distance, which makes it less sympathetic. If this is a sexual revolution, it has a DIY clumsiness that is very unimpressive, and, from the younger kids' viewpoint, incomprehensible. Maggie understands it, but does not want to be like her mother.

The kids are in their own world, beautiful and pretty cool, except for the angry Maggie, who yields her virginity to her motorcycle-riding classmate Ryan (Cody Linley), whom she has sex with in the garage, but does not love, though she's ready to ride off with him. Ultimately the four adults, the Cantwells and the Knotts, go wrong, in the wife-swapping Seventies way, but (spoiler alert!) Maggie rides off on the red motorcycle with Ryan and the younger kids simply get up and go to school, if they can catch the bus on time. This house is a mess but everybody cheats, and some can still get away with it.

The overlapping of the attic tale-telling with the daytime and then evening family action provides a sense of control and viewpoint I found satisfying right from the start. I also liked the way the house facade is seen from an angle, avoiding conventional visual cliché. There may seem little sense of space in the interior shots but that fits: the kids are part of the house; they don't step back and look at it. They get glimpses, often ugly ones, of the two partying couples. When Maggie commands her siblings to sleep together up in the attic after the partying gets raucous and hostile there are elements of desperation and denial but also of resolution and escape. The Playroom is a New York Times "Critics Pick." It has not done well otherwise with the press, judging by the Metacritic rating (54). It deserves better: its picture of kids coping with an alcoholic family deserves to be seen, and it's a bit unfair to measure it against the accomplishment of Ang Lee's film or the more complicated structure of Moody's multilayered novel. Dyer captures with sharp realism the awkward, painful intersections of the children's development and their parents' disintegrating marriage (and mother's chain-smoking and alcoholism), even if an outer context is missing and the depth of penetration into any individual character is relatively slight.

The Playroom, 83min, debuted at Tribeca in April 2012 and opened in New York 8 Feb. 2013. Screened for this review at Cinema Village, NYC, 13 Feb. 2013.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.