thumbsucker

We are each stalked by a mirror-brother. When I breathe out, he is breathing me in; when I trace a path toward water, he follows me and splashes through. For pagans who believed in their own myths, our half-spirits sculpted us in their images, fuller, fatter, and sweeter than they had ever been. So, logically, on the anniversary of our day of birth, it is to them we sacrifice sweet cakes. Because they brought us here, we call each our own engenderer, our “Genius.”

In the OED, that is the first and oldest use of the word. The second is the sullen blab of toothy socialites, and in this sense, director Mike Mills is “definitely not a genius.” But his debut film, Thumbsucker, smells like sweet cake in the oven, to be burnt in respects to his nemesis and that which created him: Zach Braff. Yes, this movie’s surface sheen waxes Garden State—and all the quirk-for-quirk’s-sake that has muddied the Indie waters for the past decade—but yes, it also does everything right that these films did wrong, and emerges triumphant.

As any pretty film about a lonesome youth who quietly navigates suburban sprawl, Thumbsucker draws obvious comparisons to Solondz’s lipsmacking Welcome to the Dollhouse and Kelly’s dreamy Donnie Darko, but Mills recasts the alienated hero as a younger Max Fischer whose bangs always splash in his face, obscuring his doe-eyes (or the world, depending on your angle). He’s a Huck Finn who doesn’t play any tricks because, well, Justin doesn’t ever do anything. Except suck his thumb—a fault which is reprimanded by his “winning-is-everything” father and cured by his new-age Hypnotist Orthodontist (played-up by a generously self-mocking Keanu Reeves).

Suddenly brought out of thumb-sucking by his “spirit animal,” poor little Justin feels comfortless; unable to deal with any real-world problems. Think not of Scarlett Johansson befuddled by Tokyo lights (though Mills is part of Coppola’s directors’ collective)—this is more like Woody Allen’s fumbling Alice, a weakling born in a world where everyone is recommending ginseng for mother’s arthritis. To wit, we get the idea that something is awry when Justin cannot open a carton of orange juice. Fuck! The orange juice is on the kitchen linoleum, Justin’s head is in his hands, “Mom, maybe it is that simple, maybe all I do need is a pill?” Dum da dum dum…The boy’s popping three pills a day and vacuum-sealing polyester suits to travel with the debate team, a dorkfest headed by a scrubby Vince Vaughn in sweater vests who doesn’t mind buying the team a six-pack every once-in-a-while to celebrate Justin’s wins.

The movie veers away from grand philosophical truths it can’t ground (We Hate Huckabees), and takes to heart Donald Barthelme’s question, “How can you feel alienated without first having been connected?” Justin connects as the new-crowned king of his 90s suburb; the kind of bucolic hellhole that drove the Columbine killers to murder and Edward Scissorhands to a mountaintop. But Mills’ doesn’t make a hokey visual joke of the repeating driveways. He’s more interested in a sort of epic suburban catalog: snitching on ugly debate girls, malicious bicycle accidents, teenage arrests, and mothers in scrubs and sweaters who never, ever wear makeup. Where other filmic attempts to show disenchantment with big names like America, Teenager-hood, and The Modern Family largely take place in “anytown, USA,” Thumbsucker grounds itself—resisting fantasy, and turning against the recent plucky trend toward timelessness (Here, I’m thinking of the films of Mr. Anderson). Thus, the film retains the tone of the snappy Walter Kirn novel on which it is based: it claims the label of fiction, but reads like memoir.
Perhaps Kirn’s plot pulled forth some angsty memory for Director Mike Mills. Though a longtime graphic designer—working on Sonic Youth album covers, skateboards, and yes, shudder…Gap ads—Mills’ most memorable work is his vandalist suburban photography. On a flyer for a photo show of his from around five years ago, I found I had written down a phrase he had manipulated in one of his works: “Neither of us can go to heaven unless the other gets in.” What profoundly moved me was not only the phrase itself, but the context in which Mills had couched it: A dark figure stands small and backlit against a housing development—all peach stucco and pipe dreams—looking at the phrase he has just sprayed in red paint. The gentle joke turns sinister, condemning the neighborhood in which it has been set. In another work, the scrawler scribbles “Can’t we just be human?”

In the same way, Mills pulls tricks with his dialogue, setting everyday phrases in vaguely creepy contexts. Perhaps this is a trick to make the viewer reel with gushy sentimentality. But I find it honorable that whenever Thumbsucker careens toward the cliché, it screeches to a halt. When Justin plops down in his bed to stare at the ceiling after a harrowing day, he breaks into maniacal laughter. When he charlestons drunkenly in a seedy hotel room, flanked by three shirtless muses, the scene dances away from Almost Famous as soon as he’s called down by the front desk. And when you feel yourself beginning to hate the success story plot, Vince Vaughn steals your thunder: “Pardon me, Justin, and I’m just being gregarious when I say this, but in my professional opinion you’ve turned in to an absolute monster.”

In the film’s final moments, Justin sacrifices the world of the film for a world outside of it, fleeing emotional problems geographically. This ending, certainly, is an easy out, and the film’s first obvious sour note. Whereas The Graduate lingers brilliantly on Elaine and Benjamin in the back of that sad, yellow bus, Mills’ cuts to credits just as Justin has sacrificed his sweet cake. Perhaps he has forgotten that you cannot run from where you came. You are followed by your own dark mirror. You are connected first to yourself.

But I'm a philistine!