Tadpole Igby Goes Down
Cooper, Rand Richards
SCREEN Rand Richards Cooper HOLDEN ON 'Tadpole' & 'Igby Goes Down' 0ecently I heard a private-school English teacher discuss her ninth-graders' surprising hostility to The Catcher in the Rye....
...But Igby's misery lacks a sympathy-winning note of self-punishment...
...A ratio you seem particularly fond of," she shoots back...
...Igby lets fly where Holden would have mused inwardly...
...In any case, his film's determined bleakness seems true to the spirit of Salinger...
...Director Gary Winik exerts a light comic touch, labeling scenes from Oscar's Thanksgiving visit home from boarding school with blackboarded aphorisms from Voltaire, such as "It is not enough to conquer...
...Sarandon, informed that Igby has flunked out of yet another school, hisses at him: "Did you ever-for a second-think about how this reflects on me...
...You call your mother Mimi...
...Last year saw Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenebaums, an archly comic study of an eccentric, dysfunctional New York family that resembled J. D. Salinger's Glass family...
...that when he goes down, he will fall and fall-as Holden's teacher, Mr...
...Hours later, his stepmother's best friend, Diane (Bebe Neuwirth, of TV's Cheers), runs into him as she returns from the party, and brings him back to her apartment to sober up...
...one must know how to seduce...
...The film's acid humor bubbles in the gap between the cheery sitcom music and what we're seeing onscreen: Igby, prodded by his neurotic, wealthy mother Mimi (Susan Sarandon) to take his daily cocktail of therapy drugs, tosses the pills at her across the table-whereupon she takes one...
...I swear to God," Holden says at one point in the novel, "if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I'd hate it...
...The anguish turns out to be Igby's schizophrenic father (Bill Pullman), confined for years in an institution...
...If the story loses something by virtue of its explicitness, I'm not sure you can blame Steers...
...Tadpole-the title refers to a childhood nickname Oscar has outgrown- is a slight thing, as sparkly and warm as Oscar's fantasies of himself with Eve, all champagne and carriage rides in Central Park played to French chansons...
...Director Winik keeps this scheme very neat, right down to tying things up with the David Bowie tune, "Changes...
...Holden-like his precursor Huck Finn-retained the conventional morality of his parents and their world, and saw himself as a failure, a screw-up...
...Fatal move, it turns out, because Diane is wearing Eve's red scarf, which Oscar sees, dangling enticingly, from his perch on the massage table....Ah, Vamourl In the romantic contretemps that ensues, Diane gushes lasciviously at lunch to her circle of middle-aged girlfriends, who clamor for Oscar's phone number...
...The self-tortured by experience versus the self-nurtured by experience: your choice between these two films depends on whether you prefer to be alarmed, or charmed.larmed, or charmed...
...That we start in childhood from a spotless purity later stained by life's corruption is the Rousseauian notion Igby's antinarrative poses against the playful Voltairean confidence of Tadpole...
...Half a century later, it's all out in plain view: Igby Goes Down is The Catcher in the Rye with the spaces filled in, extrapolated forward through a half-century of family entropy, youth rebellion, drugs, adolescent sex, and copious use of the F-word...
...Now two other films, Tadpole and Igby Goes Down, have taken up the story of prep precocious-ness adrift in Manhattan...
...We keep waiting for him to take us beneath, to where Igby's sneering sarcasm melts in pain and anguish...
...Oscar adores Eve, gazing in rapture at her hands, at her red scarf...
...Tadpole is the less Salingeresque of the pair, partly because Oscar (Aaron Stanford) is a kid Holden might have hated...
...Tadpole is breezily unconcerned about offending sensitivities in our age of worry over adult-child seduction...
...Perhaps a backlash against this attitude explains the current cinematic resurgence of the Salingeresque...
...Igby's other nemeses are his older brother, a Columbia grad geared to cynical success, and his Nietzschean businessman godfather, played by Jeff Gold-blum, who spouts casually Darwinian observations: "I believe certain people in life are meant to fall by the wayside, to serve as signposts for the rest of us...
...Things have gotten rougher since 1951, when Catcher in the Rye was published...
...Oscar calls out on the tennis court to Eve, who by now has discovered the truth...
...Played to perfection by Kier-an Culkin, Igby Slocumb sports the rude-prep outfit of school jacket with necktie askew, and angel face twisted in pure insolence...
...Holden is smart, they complain, so why is he such a loser...
...he brings her a sandwich in her lab, and when she explains her work on the depolarization of cardiac myocytes, he sighs and exclaims, "such beautiful words...
...God," sniffs one of them, sounding Holdenesque herself, "you're like a forty-year-old dropped into a fifteen-year-old's body...
...out of hurt comes perspective, and we are no longer quite who we were...
...The intellectually precocious son of a divorced and remarried Columbia professor (John Ritter), Oscar orders in restaurants in fluent French and reads Voltaire on the train...
...it's less Catcher in the Rye than Murmur of the Heart...
...he's the kind of kid who charms his father's friends but condescends to girls his own age...
...Such sentiments find little purchase among young people whose main take on their parents' success is anxiety about not attaining it themselves...
...They rejected Hold-en Caulfield's stubborn insistence on purity, his fatalistic view of adulthood as a dead-end into phoniness, cruelty, or the corruption of success...
...Neuwirth is delicious as the coolly sexual Mrs...
...he's terrified she'll reveal their affair, while she plays a mischievous footsie with him under the table...
...Unbearably smitten, Oscar flees his father's Thanksgiving party to drown his sorrows in a midtown bar...
...Antolini, warned him he might-and never stop...
...With such scathing one-liners Steers gives his film a hard carapace of irony...
...Medea was already taken," he fires back...
...Family life alternates cold contempt with the occasional fit of hysterical narcissism...
...Then came Miguel Arteta's The Good Girl, with Jake Gyllenhaal as a morose dropout and wannabe writer who calls himself Holden...
...That's partly because in 1951, family pathology stayed hidden from view...
...There's ample scope for Holdenesque hypocrisy-piercing, and Igby wields a razor sarcasm...
...Like the novel, and in opposition to Tadpole, Igby offers an anti-coming-of-age narrative...
...Flashbacks feature a harrowing scene in which he falls apart in the bathroom, screaming and beating his head, as six-year-old Igby watches in horror...
...Beneath the movie's mildly scandalous events lie the deep harmonies and reassurances of a classic coming-of-age narrative...
...Whether Holden's refusal to grow up is heroic or pathologicalwhether it is corruption he's resisting, or simply life-makes for the enduring interest of Salinger's novel...
...Holder by far is Burr Steers's comedy, Igby Goes Down...
...I wouldn't even want them to clap for me...
...Passions disturb and then yield...
...He sees himself as an adult...
...It turns scandal into repartee...
...When the fall comes, it lands him as a drug delivery boy, servicing hopeless rich girls so spoiled they pay with traveler's checks and francs-updated versions of Holden's prep monsters...
...With its cheerful Oedipal complications, and the winking amorality of its sexual initiations, Tadpole owes less to Salinger than to Louis Malle...
...When he lies down with a groan on her massage table-she's a chiropractor- she offers him a shoulder rub...
...Fear of madness is Igby's deep, secret dread...
...we don't know much of anything about Holden's parents, just that his father is a corporate lawyer who makes a lot of money, and his mother is "very nervous...
...If heaven is such a wonderful place," he challenges the school rector, "then how is getting crucified such a big fucking sacrifice...
...He's a serial dropout, a kid so obnoxious his own shrink slaps him across the face in fury...
...Robinson figure, especially in one hilarious scene in which she dines out with Oscar's father, Eve, and Oscar himself...
...Which introduces the movie's plot, because what's most French about Oscar, it turns out, is that he's in love with his stepmother, Eve, a medical research scientist (Sigourney Weaver...
...Igby's new girlfriend asks him...
...The abiding pessimism of the antinarrative defies our faith in the orderly unfolding of experience and in pain ultimately redeemed as growth...
...That's 15-40, right...
Vol. 129 • October 2002 • No. 18
