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THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS Send This Review to a Friend
Everything and the proverbial kitchen sink are stuffed into "The Safety of Objects," writer-director Rose Troche's bloated film that hits the mark on occasion but meanders around concentrating on an assortment of characters but not whipping up much excitement about any of them.
The best performance is by Glenn Close as Esther, a woman who nurses her comatose son lying at home in his bedroom as result of an auto accident that has left a residue of guilt. There is no hope but she refuses to give up, while becoming alienated from life, her husband Howard (Robert Klein) and her daughter Julie (Jessica Campbell). There is some nonsensical plotting that has Julie enter her mom in a marathon radio-sponsored contest, in which the person who can keep hands the longest on the prize automobile wins the car. It is a means of Julie getting attention and involving her mother in something.
The film, with just about everyone in emotional trouble of some kind, flits between others in the suburban neighborhood, including Patricia Clarkson as a woman getting a divorce and trying to keep her life together, and Mary Kay Place as a woman desperate to keep her youth and be attractive to her husband. There's more, too much more, including a boy fixated on dolls and a brief kidnapping by a disturbed young man. After a while it seems as if the film, although it means well, is like a soap opera that will never end.
An IFC Films release.
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