The main problem with LYMELIFE is that this story was in the heads of the Martini brothers for so many years during development that when it came time to finally shoot the thing, they apparently forgot what they had only visualized umpteen times in their brains, and what they had actually FILMED. How else can they explain a movie that looks like it was produced with the Hays censorship code of 1934 in mind; a movie that alludes to illicit sex, infidelity, brooding anger, impending violence, etc., but seems to always pull back at the last instant like a thoughtless tease, culminating with a rifle shot over a fade to black (who was hit?--the doe, the cuckolding-neighbor, the daughter-popper, or, most likely, a tree?). Jason Reitman covered some of the same ground in his 2007 film JUNO, and the teen sex initiations were believable. David Gordon Green dealt with impending violence in his 2007 movie SNOW ANGELS without pulling any punches (as did Vadim Perelman in the 2007 story THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES, and countless other directors in the modern era of flicks in a high school setting). Furthermore, Kieran Culkin's character Jimmy Bartlett clearly is supposed to be an American, so how is it that he finishes boot camp in 1979 at the beginning of the Iranian Hostage Crisis with the expectation that he's going to be "called up" any minute and transported through a wormhole to run the radar on a British aircraft carrier in the 1982 Falkland War (which has somehow been transmogrified from Britain vs. Argentina to America vs. Spain in a parallel universe of continental drift, though LYMELIFE is otherwise devoid of the science fiction elements of Richard Kelly's 2001 classic DONNIE DARKO)??!!
Review of Lymelife
