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SYNOPSIS __________
Plot:
THE CHUMSCRUBBER is a surreal cautionary tale about an alienated
youth forced to confront the disconnect between parents and
teenagers in suburbia, rendered with a razor's edge balance
of comedy and drama.
When Dean Stiffle (Billy Elliot’s Jamie Bell) discovers
the body of his best friend, Troy (Josh Janowicz), hanging
in his bedroom, he doesn’t bother telling any of the
parents in his postcard perfect California neighborhood, figuring
they wouldn’t care. Dean shows no outward signs of remorse,
and his father (William Fichtner), author of best-selling
pop psychology books with titles such as The Happy Accident,
treats his son with all the affection of a lab rat. “Dad,”
Dean deadpans, “if you write about me again in one of
your stupid books, I’m going to kill you.
While Dean shrugs his way through high school wearing a psychic
cloak of invisibility, his best friend Troy—the school’s
leading drug dealer—throws the community’s carefully
maintained psychotherapeutic balance into disarray when he
hangs himself during one of his mother’s pool parties.
At school, in an effort to get their hands on Troy’s
stash, Dean’s classmates Billy (Justin Chatwin), Crystal
(Camilla Belle), and Lee (Lou Taylor Pucci) plot a kidnapping
scheme: they’ll abduct Dean’s younger brother,
Charlie (Rory Culkin), and hold him for ransom in exchange
for Dean retrieving Troy’s pills. Only, the hapless
gang kidnaps the wrong boy, snatching Charley Bratley (Thomas
Curtis) instead. Son of divorced parents—police officer
Lou Bratley (John Heard), and interior decorator Terri (Rita
Wilson)—Charley’s disappearance goes unnoticed
by his mother, who is too consumed with the planning of her
elaborate second wedding to town mayor Michael Ebbs (Ralph
Fiennes), to realize her son has gone missing.
As these characters careen through their white-picket-fence
world, each pursuing some dream, some ideal, some panacea
they believe will make them happy—be it prescription
or illicit drugs, vitamin supplements, the perfect body, a
fairy tale wedding, self-help books, or New Age mysticism—the
fractured and fractious quality of life in American suburbia
is rendered with crystalline precision.
The young adults and adults of Hillside live The kids and
adults of Hillside live their lives entirely separately—like
two opposing camps—a mournful divide played out in a
visual scheme of sun-dappled, hallucinatory realism. Deciding
both whether and how to negotiate these two worlds is Dean,
a character whose very name purposely invokes the entire history
of troubled teenage movie outsiders, from James Dean in Rebel
Without A Cause to Christian Slater’s J.D. in Heathers.
. .
. . . And everywhere there is “The Chumscrubber.”
A totemic pop culture presence that prowls his own post-apocalyptic
landscape peopled with subhuman demons and freaks, the ubiquitous
“Chumscrubber” bubbles up in television cartoons,
in violent video games, on posters and T-shirts and stickers
and rearview mirrors as. . . An embodiment of teen rage? A
manifestation of the town’s repression? A shadow vision
of its collective unconscious?
“Don’t ignore me,” myriad characters say
to one another over the course of The Chumscrubber, and that
echoing line of dialogue—that plea—becomes a mantra
in this film about American disconnection, be it generational,
familial, cultural, or pharmaceutical. Only one character,
Mayor Ebbs, holds steadfast to the conviction that everything
connects. After suffering a freak head injury, Mayor Ebbs
comes to believe that something truly profound is scattered
beneath the surface of suburban banality, a belief borne out
in The Chumscrubber’s beautiful and hard-won conclusion.
Shakespeare contended that comedies end in weddings and tragedies
end in funerals: in a perfect expression of The Chumscrubber’s
tricky tonal highwire act—a razor’s edge balance
of comedy and drama—this remarkably assured debut has
the good grace and audacity to end with both, occurring simultaneously,
on a perfectly manicured cul-de-sac. Everything connects.
DETAILS__________
Studio:
NewMarket Films
Release Date:
August 5, 2005
RELATED LINKS__________
Small photo gallery (Production)
equitypictures.de --- CLICK
HERE
Sundance 2005 movie info
festival.sundance.org --- CLICK
HERE |
