15, 111mins
Two young script writers take their bows as directors with films about families who disintegrate before your eyes. Why employ an alien to fudge up your life at vast expense when the average parent is happy to do it for free? It’s a question that troubles Hollywood accountants as much as it did Hamlet. Since Sam Mendes won gold with American Beauty, the suburban family crisis has been adopted by aspiring auteurs as the middle-class torture of choice. Both of the following films hinge on untimely deaths; and both believe that teenage boys have the mystical grace to absolve all wrong.
Dan Harris is far better known (and paid) as the scribe of X2: X-Men United, the remake of Logan’s Run, and Charlie Chan. Imaginary Heroes is a weird blip in this winning streak. Emile Hirsch, a veteran floppy-haired specialist in errant schoolboys, is the eyes and ears of this rites-of-passage soap. His swimming-star brother commits suicide before the opening credits finish rolling. The fact that he has the cheek to be still alive is used as evidence against him for the next 105 minutes. His father, Jeff Daniels, is a proverbial bastard in denial. The slender pleasure is Sigourney Weaver as the grieving mother who lets off steam, mostly by smoking narcotics, getting arrested and screaming at her neighbours.
Her relationship with Hirsch is delightfully quirky to the point of incestuous but it doesn’t excuse the frail drama, or Harris’s hopeless proclivity to wheel out fresh skeletons whenever family arguments are in danger of expiring.