My wife took me to this movie on the basis of reports from all her friends that it was great. The reviews in the Internet Movie Database state, with some few exceptions, that it is Academy Award material.

De gustibus non disputandum, I guess.

I’m glad that I was already in a down mood when I went to see this; I would hate for it to have turned me from elation to depression, instead of just making me feel worse. I can say that if the makers intended it to be a depressing film (despite moments of fairly decent comic relief), the sort that drives whole audiences to suicide, they did their job well, and perhaps it does deserve an Oscar.

Lester and Carolyn Burnham (Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening … respectively) are a suburban couple going through various mid-life crises. Lester is not satisfied with his life (justifiably, IMHO), and Carolyn is not satisfied with the fact that she just can’t sell houses as well as the local King of Real Estate Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher). Carolyn eases her problems by throwing herself into a wild affair with the King; Lester, in his turn, gets the violent hots for high-school nymphomaniac Angela (Mena Suvari), friend of alienated daughter Jane (Thora Birch), a creepy kid who in turn falls for drug-dealing, sneak-taping neighbor Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), son of a rigid ex-Marine colonel who has good reason for hating gays and other perverts, and his wife who sits around doing nothing but sit around doing nothing. I don’t think it’s wrong to say, as one or two other reviewers have said, that the druggie kid is the only normal person in the whole film. Well, that’s not quite true; there is also one non-dysfunctional family, the gay couple who live on the other side of the Burnhams — watch for Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap as one of the two Jims — but they do little except jog a lot. In fact, based on this film I would suggest that the anti-gay-marriage initiative on next year’s California ballot be scrapped in favor of an anti-straight-marriage one.

I give away nothing when I say that the climactic high point of the film is when Lester gets his brains blown out (he explicitly states in the first couple of minutes of the film that he will be dead at the end); the suspense comes in trying to figure out from which of three possible sources the fatal shot will come. Too bad, because Lester, despite his flaws, had pretty much established himself in my mind as the most likable character in the whole film, though I’d give young Angela second place…

I think I’ll pass on seeing this one again.