March 3- 9, 2005

movies

Up In Smoke

swing time: Sigourney Weaver and Emile Hirsch prepare to toke up.

A suburban family's many secrets emerge from a haze of drugs and depression.

Imaginary Heroes

by Cindy Fuchs

Sinking under years of guilt and resentment, suburban mom Sandy (Sigourney Weaver) decides to try smoking weed. Finding the stash that daughter Penny (Michelle Williams) has hidden away for son Tim (Emile Hirsch), she rolls a gargantuan blunt, plants herself on the backyard swing, and starts toking. Observed indiscreetly by neighbor Marge (Deirdre O'Connell), Sandy is soon stoned out of her mind, splayed on the lawn, her face upturned to the starry sky but eyes closed.

Alas, this respite is predictably temporary. Another American independent film that turns relentlessly inward, Dan Harris's Imaginary Heroes keeps digging into Sandy's darkly secreted past, producing a series of revelations and reconciliations that end up less surprising than tiresome. The stage for excavation is set by the early Major Event, that is, the suicide of Sandy's son, high school swimming superstar Matt (Kip Pardue). The act appears to be his final defiance against over-invested dad Ben's (Jeff Daniels) plan, that he/they go on to swimming fame and fortune (Olympic trials loom in their future), but a brief, pained exchange of glances between Matt and his brother Tim just before Matt shoots himself suggests that something else is at stake.

While he's painfully removed from his father, Tim is close with both Sandy and Penny, in different ways. While Penny's life apart from the family takes her offscreen for much of the film's running time (too bad, given the relief offered by Williams' delicate performance), Sandy feels omnipresent, insisting on the remarkable intimacy of their mother-son relationship and noting Ben's inability to appreciate Tim's nonathletic gifts. ("Don't worry," she says following one of Ben's several insensitive comments. "He's just an old bitter asshole.")

While Sandy provides wry insight and determined emotional support, Tim's journey from understandable depression to self-understanding takes up much of Imaginary Heroes' focus. As the film adopts a seasonal structure (sections named "Winter," "Spring," etc.) and provides Tim with literal-though-mysterious bruises (to be explained later), his ups-and-downs take place against holidays and weather. His friendship with Marge's vaguely angry, sort-of-delinquent son Kyle (Ryan Donowho) causes some adults (namely, Ben) concern, but Sandy appreciates the boys' angst. When Tim, sent home from school for some minor infraction, sighs, "People are so stupid I can't bear to live around them anymore," she can only commiserate, "They only get worse."

Lonely and self-seeking, the boys eventually find themselves in a New Year's Eve, Ecstasy-fueled clinch. The next morning, they wake side-by-side and agree to ignore what happened, which means they start avoiding each other and so become more vulnerable to adult influences. Though Tim does his best to withdraw, scribbling furiously in his journal, his mom begins adventuring, flirting with a grocery store checker and visiting the local head shop (complete with dark glasses and a rationale that she's from "the '60s"). Their different tacks lead them to expected shared ground, another nuclear unit disrupted (going so far as incest, a point that remains unnamed and not dealt-with) and, by graduation time, fixed.

Imaginary Heroes Written and directed by Dan Harris A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Five