Undescribable Perfection

People are voting emotionally.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The Travis family has to deal with the popular athletic older son Matt's suicide. Tim (Emile Hirsch) is trying to live with everybody's sympathies. Mother Sandy (Sigourney Weaver) starts smoking marijuana. Father Ben (Jeff Daniels) abandons work and spends his days in the park. Sister Penny (Michelle Williams) returns home from college on occasions.I like Tim and Sandy's journey in dealing with the lost in the first half. It would be a fine quiet small indie if that's the movie. However writer/director Dan Harris wants this movie to be about secrets. He holds all of it back until the second half. It leaves the first half with an emptiness like the movie is refusing to let the audience into the story. Once the reveals start happening, it diminishes the power of the lost somehow. It tries to give it meaning and loses its value.

This film is a great example of a storyteller who doesn't understand the story that he's telling. I know that sounds like an absurd thing to allege. How can the guy telling the tale not understand it? However, it's the only way I can explain the bizarrely wrong emotional focus and characterizations on display in Imaginary Heroes. Writer/director Dan Harris is like a cook who set out to make an apple pie, yet tried to make it with kumquats and licorice. You might be able to make something oddly tasty out of those ingredients, but not by following an apple pie recipe. This movie has the structure and style of a by-the-numbers tale of 21st century suburban angst stuck in between a beginning which unknowingly negates its own premise and an ending with an escalating series of ridiculous revelations that even Harris can't keep up with. Things start out with 17 year old Tim Travis (Emile Hirsch) telling us that his older brother Matt (Kip Pardue) killed himself because he was incredibly great at swimming at the same time he hated swimming more than anything else in the world. Now, I have to confess, this opening with Tim's narration of images of Matt put me off this film right away, long before any of the other flaws reared their head. I can imagine someone hating the obsessive demands of competitive sports or the pressure of competition. How the hell does anyone hate the act of swimming enough to commit suicide? If you really disliked it that much, you'd stop swimming when you were too young for anyone to know you were any good at it. To say that Matt killed himself because he hated swimming is a ludicrously simplistic description of a much more complex dynamic, and if the point of Tim describing it like that would have been to illustrate how ludicrously simplistic Tim's thinking or view of the world is…that might have been interesting. Unfortunately, every example of human behavior in this movie is as ludicrously simplistic as Tim's analysis of his brother offing himself.Even if I'm overreacting to that, the rest of Imaginary Heroes still isn't any good. It starts off with suicide and then focuses on the characters least affected by that tragedy. Tim and his mom, Sandy (Sigourney Weaver), go about with their unimaginatively angsty suburban lives and there's no meaningful connection between anything they do and what happened to Matt. The only one who is affected by it is Tim's dad, Ben (Jeff Daniels), and he's a terribly written character who only exists to serve the Almighty Plot Hammer. Ben switches from resentful bastard to fumbling, desperate, nice guy to wounded father to suit whatever particular scene Tim and Sandy are in at the moment. In this script, Tim and Sandy are meant to be actual human beings while Ben is never considered as more than a prop.At least Ben gets a decent amount of screen time servicing Tim and Sandy's narratives. Tim also has an older sister, Penny (Michelle Williams), and I haven't the foggiest idea what this character is doing in this movie at all. Her existence has no purpose or function and she contributes nothing to the story. She's dead weight that should have been cut out of the screenplay very early on in the process and is another glaring example of how filmmakers occasionally need someone to tell them "no". Penny isn't nearly as glaring a necessary deletion as Jar Jar Binks, but I'd say she's about a .4 on the Binks scale.There isn't much of a plot to Imaginary Heroes. Stuff just happens. Most of it's boring and I could go on and on about how what isn't boring doesn't make any sense. I just want to focus on one big, whanging crazy thing. This is going to spoil a significant aspect of the film, so if you haven't seen it and ever plan to…stop reading now.Okay, here it comes. After having some sort of drug addled sex with his best friend Kyle (Ryan Donowho), Tim eventually discovers that Ben, the father who's never liked him and treated him like crap his whole life, isn't his biological father. It turns out Sandy had an affair with Kyle's dad and that's how she got pregnant with Tim. Now, which of these do you think would be more traumatic?1. Finding out the son of a bitch who's made your life miserable isn't your real father?2. Finding out you just boinked your half-brother?Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think the whole "you screwed your half-brother" situation would be a much, much bigger deal. Once the secret of Tim's parentage is revealed, though, no one and nothing in the movie ever references or even alludes to the whole "sex with your half-brother" thing. There's a very big fuss made of Ben not being Tim's real dad, but Tim shtupping a blood relative gets flushed down the memory hole and is never seen or heard from again. Am I wrong about this? Is finding out that you essentially were the product of a sperm donor more disturbing than being told you've ignorantly committed incest?I don't know what else I can tell you about Imaginary Heroes. The parts of this film that aren't boring are wildly and weirdly ill considered. Unless you like kumquats and licorice with a nice, flaky crust…don't bother with this movie.

It was the writer and film theorist Wheeler Winston Dixon who wrote harsh things about 1999s American Beauty, labelling it "relentlessly teen driven; a film in which Kevin Spacey smokes marijuana and regresses into his supposedly idyllic teenhood. Substance, depth and characterisation are ruthlessly stripped down in favour of instantly readable icons." To a degree; that's exactly what happens in Imaginary Heroes, a film in which Sigourney Weaver plays a mother called Sandy Travis – a mother who smokes drugs after a tragedy strikes a typical suburban American family.But this is a film where we do not spend enough time with the Travis family in question to know weather they were this dysfunctional before the tragic event that altered everyone's lives. The study in Imaginary Heroes is of loss and coming to grips with that loss. The son Tim (Hirsch) plays his role as if he is auditioning for Donnie Darko but does really well in getting across the whole 'alienated teen' characterisation. Along with this, the father and husband Ben (Daniels) shows the exact opposite mentality to that of his wife, Sandy, in the sense he is devastated and rather than take drugs in order to get reintroduced to his youth, he uses days at the park to try and kill off his sadness. I got the feeling Imaginary Heroes was supposed to be somewhat of a comedy, perhaps no coincidence that American Beauty was also a comedy but whilst I'm not saying I agree with Dixon, if Imaginary Heroes was trying to be funny I cannot see how someone can laugh at a film that includes students committing suicide, taking Ecstasy and self harming themselves.I think the mere idea of Sigourney Weaver smoking drugs, getting high, hurling snowballs at the glass windows of abandoned buildings, getting arrested, taking down phone numbers of those younger than her and generally getting back into touch with her youth is enough to make anyone chuckle but this is where casting and ideas come into play. Firstly, I think we are supposed to laugh at Sigourney's antics; we are supposed to laugh at Tim's little misadventures and his little depressed teen one liners he springs out. I also see the filmmakers sort of telling us they realise this by making Jeff Daniels' character the most serious and as a result unfunny character of the film; odd how the one person in the cast who perhaps might just be the one to make us laugh is, not relegated, but placed in the position of one who will most definitely NOT make us laugh. Take 1994's Speed as an example; a serious and down to earth action film but one of which has Daniels crack the odd one-liner; we look to him for the comic relief after the life or death situations, and he delivers. However in this film, he is the most serious and as a result, best character on offer – there is no funny jibe; there is no one-liner, just pure emotion and character study which borders on mental illness.Like I said, the film is a study of loss and a study of how people deal with loss. In American Beauty, which is strikingly similar, Spacey's character is depressed and fed up with life and uses drugs as a means to escape it all. Although Imaginary Heroes attempts to relegate American Beauty because it gives its characters actual reason to do the things they do. American Beauty begins with a monologue of how fed up with everything Spacey actually is, a monologue that makes us laugh and perhaps associate with the character; Imaginary Heroes begins with a suicide – boom, end of. And yet Imaginary Heroes goes on to have its protagonist lie on their lawn and look at the stars as they dance around; the next door neighbour has to use a hose to wake her up and then everything's alright again. Spacey's character and his descent through life is better and more interesting, with real reason to chuckle once or twice; by comparison, by the time we've seen Sandy get arrested some of us have probably forgotten all about the suicide at the beginning.But while the film confuses its ideas in genre, it remains a great study of loss even if I would've liked to have seen more of Ben than I did of Sandy. Tim plays a teen who seems to be holding some black secrets but at the same time, we must see him progress through his own personal 'coming of age' hell of bullying and girls at his school. There is also room for the film to make a statement at the very end on America's gun culture and problems that arise with that; when a certain character pulls out a revolver near the very end, it feels as of we are supposed to have a sharp jolt happen to us, a reaction of some kind; but in the end it just confirms how unhappy that person was before the film's events had even started. The film may be a comedy, a tragedy and a study of human emotion but one thing it certainly isn't is uninteresting to read into.

Watching this film is often not a pleasant experience, but then it isn't meant to be. The main protagonist, Tim, seems very passive - a sort of 'everyman' character, pushed around by life - whereas I wanted to slap both his mother and his father more than once. However as the film went on it became obvious that everyone had a good reason for behaving the way they did; everyone was harbouring a secret, and sometimes more than one. I don't agree with the other commenters who felt the ending was too neat; there was at least one major plot-line unresolved - i.e., what happens to Tim's relationship with Kyle in the light of Tim's new knowledge about his father? The whole Tim/Kyle dynamic was beautifully done. Their immaturity in dealing with their feelings for one another worked superbly in the context of their ages. It also informed the darker thread of Tim's relationship with Matt, and if there's a standout performance in the film for me it has to be Kip Pardue playing against type as the tortured older brother.The only quibble I have is that I couldn't quite see why Sigourney Weaver and Jeff Daniels, as the parents, would ever have been attracted to one another in the first place. They were both excellent, but somehow just failed to convince me that they ever were or ever could have been a married couple.It's an uncomfortable film, certainly not a compilation of familiar clichés, but it has a lot in common with "Monster's Ball" in the way it stays in the memory, provokes thought, and ultimately gives one hope even for the most dysfunctional of relationships.