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First Look: The Chumscrubber
Release Date: Summer 2005
Distributor: Newmarket Films
Director: Arie Posin
Producers: Lawrence Bender and Bonnie Curtis
Screenwriter: Zac Stanford
Cast: Jamie Bell, Camilla Belle, Justin Chatwin, Glenn Close, Rory Culkin,
William Fichtner, Ralph Fiennes, John Heard, Lauren Holly, Allison Janney,
Josh Janowicz, Carrie-Anne Moss, Lou Taylor Pucci, and Rita Wilson
Synopsis:
When Dean Stiffle ("Billy Elliot's Jamie Bell) discovers the body
of his best friend, Troy (Josh Janowicz), hanging in his bedroom, he doesn't
bother telling any of the parents in his postcard perfect California neighborhood,
figuring they wouldn't care. Dean shows no outward signs of remorse, and
his father (William Fichtner), author of best-selling pop psychology books
with titles such as The Happy Accident, treats his son with all the affection
of a lab rat. "Dad," Dean deadpans, "if you write about
me again in one of your stupid books, I'm going to kill you."
While Dean shrugs his way through high school wearing a psychic cloak
of invisibility, his best friend Troy—the school's leading drug
dealer—throws the community's carefully maintained psychotherapeutic
balance into disarray when he hangs himself during one of his mother's
pool parties. At school, in an effort to get their hands on Troy's stash,
Dean's classmates Billy (Justin Chatwin), Crystal (Camilla Belle), and
Lee (Lou Taylor Pucci) plot a kidnapping scheme: they'll abduct Dean's
younger brother, Charlie (Rory Culkin), and hold him for ransom in exchange
for Dean retrieving Troy's pills. Only, the hapless gang kidnaps the wrong
boy, snatching Charley Bratley (Thomas Curtis) instead. Son of divorced
parents—police officer Lou Bratley (John Heard), and interior decorator
Terri (Rita Wilson)—Charley's disappearance goes unnoticed by his
mother, who is too consumed with the planning of her elaborate second
wedding to town mayor Michael Ebbs (Ralph Fiennes), to realize her son
has gone missing.
As these characters careen through their white-picket-fence world, each
pursuing some dream, some ideal, some panacea they believe will make them
happy—be it prescription or illicit drugs, vitamin supplements,
the perfect body, a fairy tale wedding, self-help books, or New Age mysticism—the
fractured and fractious quality of life in American suburbia is rendered
with crystalline precision.
The kids and adults of Hillside live their lives entirely separately—like
two opposing camps—a mournful divide played out in a visual scheme
of sun-dappled, hallucinatory realism. Deciding both whether and how to
negotiate these two worlds is Dean, a character whose very name purposely
invokes the entire history of troubled teenage movie outsiders, from James
Dean in Rebel Without A Cause to Christian Slater's J.D. in Heathers.
. .
. . . And everywhere there is "The Chumscrubber." A totemic
pop culture presence that prowls his own post-apocalyptic landscape peopled
with subhuman demons and freaks, the ubiquitous "Chumscrubber"
bubbles up in television cartoons, in violent video games, on posters
and T-shirts and stickers and rearview mirrors as. . . An embodiment of
teen rage? A manifestation of the town's repression? A shadow vision of
its collective unconscious?
"Don't ignore me," myriad characters say to one another over
the course of The Chumscrubber, and that echoing line of dialogue—that
plea—becomes a mantra in this film about American disconnection,
be it generational, familial, cultural, or pharmaceutical. Only one character,
Mayor Ebbs, holds steadfast to the conviction that everything connects.
After suffering a freak head injury, Mayor Ebbs comes to believe that
something truly profound is scattered beneath the surface of suburban
banality, a belief borne out in The Chumscrubber's beautiful and hard-won
conclusion.
As the teens play out their botched kidnapping, Troy's devastated mother
(Glenn Close) plans a memorial service, and Terri and Michael prepare
for their wedding, the parallel story strands converge in the film's immensely
satisfying culmination. Shakespeare contended that comedies end in weddings
and tragedies end in funerals: in a perfect expression of The Chumscrubber's
tricky tonal highwire act—a razor's edge balance of comedy and drama—this
remarkably assured debut has the good grace and audacity to end with both,
occurring simultaneously, on a perfectly manicured cul-de-sac. Everything
connects.
At first glance perhaps evoking the despair-beneath-the-hedges genre,
The Chumscrubber possesses a wondrous sense of American magic realism
uniquely its own. First-time director Arie Posin is also exceedingly generous
toward his characters; investing each of the players in his large cast
with a novelistic sense of empathy, ambiguity, and complexity. A work
of brutal, uncompromising honesty The Chumscrubber is also, somehow, miraculously
devoid of vitriol.
Richly layered, thematically provocative, filled with epiphanic visual
moments and a haunting original score by James Horner, stocked with the
deepest cast bench of any recent ensemble film, The Chumscrubber announces
the arrival of a major film artist.
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