Directed by the actor, Steve Buscemi, from an autobiographical
first script by James C. Strouse, Lonesome Jim takes on a
big subject and does a creditable job with it. Like its hero, it’s
not quite sure where it is going, but, unlike him, it has a lot of
fun getting there. Jim (Casey Affleck) returns at age 27 to his
hometown of Cromwell, Indiana, having failed to make it as a writer
in New York. He seems even to have failed at dog walking, which is
what he did to earn money while trying to write. His father, Don
(Seymour Cassell), is obviously less than overjoyed at the prospect
of a grown son moving back in with them, not least because his
older son, Tim (Kevin Corrigan), has already done the same. He
orders Jim to go to work in the family’s factory making
ladders.
But his wife and the boys’ mother, Sally (Mary Kay Place),
welcomes Jim without conditions and is completely uncomplicated in
her happiness at having her sons living at home with her. She
ignores the musk of failure that clings to both of them, and, when
Jim the prodigal returns, fusses over him excessively. She even
barges in on him when he is in the bathtub and calls him her boy.
“I’m not a boy, mom,” says Jim, wearily as he shields his private
parts.
“Yes you are. You’re my boy. My pretty boy.”
At first it looks as if this smothering mother is connected to
Jim’s depression, which at times renders him almost catatonic. The
indifference, bordering on hostility, with which he greets her
professions of love and affection somehow seems to make sense as
the family sit around the heavily-laden breakfast table and listen
to “Love Can Make You Happy” by Mercy on the easy-listening
station. The impression is furthered by the suicidal mood of
brother Tim. “What did we do to make you kids so unhappy?” mom asks
Jim.
“I don’t know,” he thoughtlessly replies. “Maybe some people
just shouldn’t be parents.”
Tim is an even bigger failure than Jim is. Jim couldn’t make it
in New York; Tim couldn’t even make it in Cromwell. “I think about
ending it all as it is,” says the younger to the older brother. “I
can’t even imagine what it must be like to have your life”
— that is, divorced with two daughters and a hostile ex-wife,
rejected by the Cromwell police force, living with his parents and
working for minimum wage. “I’m a f***-up,” he adds, “but you’re a
goddamn tragedy.” Tim promptly goes out and wraps his car around a
tree — not his first “accident,” though the only thing accidental
about it, he later maintains, is that he lives, albeit with two
broken legs.
But, refreshingly, mom turns out not to be the problem.
On the contrary, her love for her “boys” is movingly direct and
genuine, and we gradually come to value it, as does Jim himself, as
the touchstone of goodness and decency in a world darkened by
sadness. It helps, too, that Jim has growing feelings for a
divorced nurse, Anika (Liv Tyler), and her young son, Ben (Jack
Rovello). Anika is as upbeat as Sally is. She likes to help people,
she says, when Jim gets jealous to find her visiting bedridden Tim.
Meanwhile, as far as Tim is concerned, the fact that Anika is
sleeping with his brother must mean that “she has no standards. I
bet she’d do it with me, too.”
That kind of nastiness presumably arises out of his
self-loathing, and it is echoed in Jim’s Uncle Stacy (Mark Boone
Junior), who likes people to call him “Evil” and who also works at
the ladder factory. Fat, hirsute and utterly unprincipled, Uncle
Evil lives up to his name, dealing drugs out of his trailer and
blackmailing Jim when Sally gets sent to jail for his misdeeds.
AND YET THE MOVIE IS ALSO often laugh-out-loud funny. What I liked
about it is its exposure of the absurdity of despair, evident in
the insane competition between the two brothers as to who is the
more miserable. “I sort of came back to have a nervous breakdown,”
Jim confesses to Anika, and then adds under his breath: “Bastard
beat me to it.” We see that the problem here is that the despairing
take themselves so seriously, mistaking their gloomy mental world
for the whole world and their feelings for the whole world of
feelings. And the only thing more absurd than someone’s taking
himself too seriously is someone who doesn’t have a clue that that
is what he is doing.
Tim falls into the latter category, but Jim gradually emerges
from his room decorated with photos of the suicidal writers — Poe,
Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, William Burroughs — who are his heroes
into a degree of self-awareness and self-detachment, which are
remedies for both despair and absurdity. The only thing I didn’t
like about Lonesome Jim is that Tim’s assessment of Anika
as lacking standards is uncomfortably close to the truth. She likes
to show off her tolerance for hard liquor and jumps into bed with
Jim within moments of meeting him. Ben’s father is clearly a bum
and so is Jim for most of the movie. Why does she put up with him?
I suspect that, having gone way out on a limb to give us a portrait
of goodness in Jim’s mother, Mr. Strouse decided he’d better draw
back from such saintly excess and humanize Jim’s girlfriend a bit
— and that he didn’t know any other way to do it. But in the
scheme of things this is a small flaw and doesn’t prevent the movie
from being well worth seeing.
