Kevin Kline as the father George Monroe and introducing Hayden Christensen as his son, Sam. These players are at their best in this sad and raw slice of life – and inspiration on how to break free from your plastic days.
A subtle juxtaposition of the morning routine for father and son – detached from each other, as they are. Your mass manufactured life. Your job or school, more like a prison or a factory. Schools where they throw kids at a tall wall – skulls smashing and cave-in on impact. A few manage to climb the wall. Instead of building a ladder for them all, to get over. Or teaching them to construct a door.
And it’s acceptable, it’s normal to feel that you have to go to a place every day, that feels more like a prison every day. Visa Cards and suit and ties. The job you hate. The parents you wish could tell you something true. Something that can explain away all of the mistakes.
And endless traps of camouflage and obligation.
One of the most challenging emotions is an already frustrated and dominated teenager being forced into an uncomfortable situation.
This film deals with some really heavy issues. Male prostitution and death among them. I don’t expect you to side with the kid when he’s acting spoiled and obnoxious. But all parties involved are in the wrong, because they don’t have a clue how to change. George is the hero who turns this upside down world right side up.
The pressure on the parents is almost unbearable, pressure to try and connect with their child. To make him smile. To stop him from making some terrible mistakes, spiralling into misery and a cliché of drugs and self-harm.
His parents are fed up, out of options, with no clue what is left to do with him. The question not asked is what do the parents really want or expect from him.
The son is screaming in silence about the pain of his emotionally bankrupt world – what he’s really thinking, feeling, going through, is never actually explored. And I think this is unfortunate – Basketball Diaries springs to mind. But he wants what every young man wants, he wants love, sex and food, and he wants to enjoy himself and find passion. His life consistently gets in the way of his desires, which are uncertain and immature.
And nobody is listening. The mother has no idea how to talk to him.
George fails consistently, but at least he’s trying.
The mother Robin Kimball (Kristin Scott Thomas) is beautiful but she is run ragged and looks exhausted. And her husband Peter (Jamey Sheridan) is indifferent. We see her beauty gradually as she spends more time with George and Sam.
The music is atmospheric and helps tell the story. The poignant moments are simply and expertly performed and recorded with waves crashing against the rocks in the background – reminding some of us of the fickle love affairs on Summer beach holidays.
It is an important fact that is often disregarded, belittled, ignored and misunderstood by parents. Which is that teenagers need emotional space in order to express themselves and find their way to forming themselves as individuals, figure out what kind of person they want to be, form an identity or three.
Showing feelings in a blunt and sincere, direct way is too difficult for most teenagers. Parents need to make the effort to reduce the difficulty to communicate with each other honestly. In an ordinary household like this one, these truths are either ignored or simply unknown.
Too many surface arguments – no one bothers to try to understand the other. The truth is that all parents are bewildered by their offspring despite their wealth of experience. They are all simply making it up as they go along. Trying to do a better job than their own parents did.
This is a genuine portrait of not only American but global male teen angst. Often the frustrations played out in rebellion reflect sexual confusions and inadequacies, as well as the problem of a naiave, uncertain and tortured self esteem. Fear of self.
“Your job, your purpose is to get accepted, get a cute girlfriend, think up something great to do with the rest of your life. What if you're confused and can't imagine a career? What if you're funny looking and can't get a girlfriend? You see, no-one wants to hear it. But the terrible secret is that being young is sometimes less fun than being dead.” – Hard Harry, Pump Up the Volume
George has worked at his job diligently for 20 years, he always hated his job, and he gets no respect. Loyal, disciplined, conservative, hard work for two decades and it means what?
Life As A House constantly touches the heart strings with Kline’s subtle yet strong portrayal of a man with a weight on his mind and a new mission for this phase of his life.
This could be one of the most honest films I’ve seen and it’s somehow directed by the guy who directed Sandra Bullock in The Net which was b-grade Scifi at its worst.
The story is about a man’s life at fifty-something. But it cannot avoid also being about his relationships – the lives he manages finally to touch in his desperate late efforts.
Build a house.
The best part of this film is George’s relentless attempts to reach out to his son – that fail repeatedly at first.
I feel it is a familiar sensation for some of us when we were young, looking through our father’s things. You know in the back of your mind that if you take some of his tobacco, alcohol, drugs, firearms – he will notice it missing. But you convince yourself that he won’t if you only take one, two, three. And you will get the buzz that will make your life better in this moment, and that feeling outweighs the risk plus the guilt.
4 stars
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