(2008) Sixteen-year-old, foul-mouthed Meghan (Dreama Walker) articulates unending hatred ("Bitch") toward her mother. Her older, bright, college-bound brother Michael (Robbie Sublett) stutters when under stress; younger sibling Spencer (Jacob Kogan) has attention deficit disorder and a pet snake. The parents, Ira (Josh Pais), a dermatologist, and Nancy Bernstein (Jane Adams), a kindergarten teacher, appear to have little ability to control or discipline their kids. Cynical, selfish Meghan and nihilistic, attention-seeking Spencer are especially disrespectful.

On Saturday morning this dysfunctional family gets ready in director/writer/producer Rob Margolies's revelatory film of psychological horror to see Dr Livingston (Joe Morton), but first Mike and Meg have to chase down their undersized twelve-year-old brother, handcuff him, and bring him back to the car before they can depart.

Gathered together in Dr Livingston's office, they are greeted by the family counselor in dreadlocks, whose chair Spencer appropriates for himself. Like a Kaluza-Klein compactification of six hidden dimensions, in addition to the four spacetime dimensions in which events appear to take place, each of the Bernsteins as well as Dr Livingston has a secret tightly rolled up inside, which provides a key to understanding each's behavior and will be revealed in the course of the story. Only the first two (least disturbing) confessionals will I disclose here.

Ira, who has a habit of beating around the bush, avoiding making direct statements, finally announces that he and Nancy, after 24 years of marriage, have agreed to "a mutual separation" - getting divorced - because "physically I happen to be attracted to …" - he's gay. His boyfriend is Nancy's fellow kindergarten teacher, Patrick Hennessey, for which she holds herself partly to blame because a few months back she urged Patrick to see her husband concerning a mole on the back of his neck. But Dad offers hope that they will remain friends and hold holidays together.

In a session with Dr Livingston without the children, Nancy and Ira admit, "We never had normal sex," and to their both having voted for George W. Bush twice. What at first appears to be a dark comedy eventually gets pulled into a black hole of deep-space despair, concluding with some cicatrisation for anodynic repair.

While Nancy remains in conference with the doctor, Ira returns to the room where his children are astonishingly behaving themselves. "None of you would be here today," he tells them in a rare instance of finding the means of speaking for himself, if he'd realized before he met their mother that he was differently oriented sexually. Life is full of surprises, he says to the three offspring; and all of the most special moments in his life have occurred during his marriage involving them. But in his private session with Dr Livingston he's more candid about his homosexual history.

With Spencer, Dr Livingston attempts to penetrate the boy's refusal to open up to being helped, giving Spencer an honest appraisal of what he sees in the intentionally exasperating antics and playing games with people's heads: it's all a manifestation of believing no one else feels similar pain locked inside. For his part, Spencer, momentarily nonplussed, thinks the psychologist can read his mind and asks Dr Livingston to say what number he's thinking of; assuring Spencer he can't read minds, Dr Livingston nevertheless answers with "five," Spencer's number.

In his discussion alone with 18-year-old Mikey, Dr Livingston delves into the cause of his stuttering (usually associated with some type of abuse as a child), an incident repressed to the point that the young man has created a hopeless persona to cover up what's gnawing from within. Prying open the locked closet releases a justifiably atrocious incident encased in guilt from seven years before.

In Meghan he sees an extremely insecure girl without appreciation for anyone else's feelings: "Do you care about anything?" Though she concedes that she doesn't trust the few friends she has, with the exception of her boyfriend Chris (a relationship of 24 days with no sex between them, not a sleaze), she damningly castigates her mother's persistent efforts to control her, always being on her back. Dr Livingston responds by defining her merciless condemnation as "harshly overreacting," until she begins her startling (especially to Dr Livingston) confession with: "I've never told anybody this."

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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