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Life as a House
Directed by Irwin Winkler New Line Cinema, 2001
124 minutes Kevin Kline, Kristen Scott Thomas, Hayden Christensen,
Jena Malone
It is easy to compare "Life as a House"
with such films as "In the Bedroom", "American Beauty",
"Grand Canyon", "My Life", or "The Ice
Storm" because these movies share many elements, from structure
to cinematography to plot to characters to dialogue. It’s familiar
territory (especially for Kevin Kline.) Simply put, a middle-aged
man faces a crisis or death, looks for meaning and changes his life...
sometimes in order to leave a legacy of love.
In "Life as a House," this thesis brings
together a mixture of likeable, weak characters along with unsavory ones
doing drugs and having inappropriate and illegal sex. There's some
bad language and lots of bad attitude, too. Everyone is searching
for interior freedom. The film could have been called, "life
as a toilet" or bathroom for all the action that takes place
therein. However, this movie is no blithe South Park. The toilet
represents the depths to which the main characters have sunk. The
shower activity is a kind of sign for cleansing action but jumping
into the ocean is the fulfillment of interior transformation.
The story rolls out amidst a very obvious parallel,
therapeutic style plot structure. To effect change, to move from
unhappiness to happiness, fired-architect George (Kevin Kline) decides
to tear down his old house and build a new one in its place.
He demands that his druggie, pierced, eye-shadowed son, Sam,
spend the summer with him to carry out a bigger, deeper project:
to get Sam to love him again. The house-building project is a metaphor
for the changes in George’s interior life and one by one, the
people around him.
After recently seeing "In the Bedroom"
and "Monster’s Ball", I have to place "Life
as a House" in the category of the year 2001’s heavy-duty
emotional dramas. Enough already. But the difference between "Life
as a House" and the other two is that you have *to like* this
one, even for its faults. Some of these are, for example, the traditional
Hollywood ending that leaves us feeling pretty good, the metaphor
of the "house" and the "moral of the story"
that are just so obvious. On the comfort scale, "In the Bedroom"
and "Monster's Ball" were far more difficult films, harder *to enjoy*
in the regular Hollywood sense.
The thing is, "Life as a House" worked
for me. The different generations talked about all the
issues that "American Beauty" didn’t, for example,
how young people can feel as if they are "nothing" and
how parents need to be parents regardless of their own "needs."
Maybe it "talked" a little too much, true and perhaps
the script was too predictable and not as tight and sharp as it
could have been. But the characters in the film find ways to communicate,
albeit some are not always desirable such as the shower scenes;
the high school pimp and car sex; the drugs; the older woman having
sex with a teen aged boy. I did not feel these were necessarily
gratuitous though they were certainly uncomfortable - but therein
is their strength as elements that move the story ahead.
Most of the characters grow and change and become
capable of generosity and love. When it becomes obvious that George
will not live to complete his project, he tells his son, "Finish
it, Sam", and we know that though Sam may not do exactly as
is father wants (keep the house after it is finished), he will do
what his father hoped for (I can’t tell you this or I’d
give away the final plot point.)
Kristen Scott Thomas is not one of my favorite actresses,
but she does a credible job here; Hayden Christensen and Jena Malone
are two young actors who will go far.
On the down side, here is another guy movie, about
the interior journey of white, Western men as the symbol for universal
human experience. Ho hum. Good media literacy point and a challenge
to the creative community, both male and female.
"Life as a House" was not a commercial
success, but it’s a movie I would recommend for thoughtful mature
movie-watchers. There’s much to talk about, such as parenting,
relationships, life-death, drugs and other self-destructive behavior
and how positive human interaction (love as communicative action)
can help others, and self, to be transformed. These issues and more
are dealt with in the film and even if they are not resolved as
well as they might be for some viewers, the overall experience of
the film is a positive one because it shows that it’s never
too late to change. Life isn’t perfect either. Human freedom
and responsibility are put into balance here and it is good to take
time to just "be" so we can then be present to others. Our
eyes and ears are opened to the humanity around us. As George tells
his son:
"If you were a
house, Sam,
this is where you’d want to be built…
on a rock, facing the sea. Listening."
April 8, 2002
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