Life as a House Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)November 7th, 2001
LIFE AS A HOUSE
R, 128 minutes
Directed by Irwin Winkler
WHEN, WHERE
Now playing at the UA De Vargas
For most of “Life as a House,” a period which covers about four months and feels it, George Monroe sports the same length of grizzled stubble on his lean jaw. Consider that the whiskers are generated inside the head of Kevin Kline, an actor of enormous talent and taste, and you begin to understand why. It’s as if his beard grew that far, got a load of the story, and refused to come out any further.
George (Kline) is an architect who is fired by the large, unfeeling Los Angeles firm where he has labored for a quarter of a century because he won’t adapt to the modern world and start doing computer models instead of building them materially, the old-fashioned way. He takes the news badly, but worse news is at hand: he has only a few months to live.
What’s a terminally ill unemployed architect to do? Build a metaphor, of course. He decides to tear down the Dogpatch-style shack where he lives on a breathtaking ocean-view lot amidst the opulent splendor of an upscale community on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and build his dream house. At the same time he will be rebuilding his damaged relationship with his teenage son Sam (Hayden Christensen), an angst-ridden, alienated druggie with purple hair, eye makeup, and a face and body pierced with enough metal to effectively disqualify him from air travel for the rest of his life. Sam lives sullenly with his mother Robin (Kristen Scott Thomas), who is trapped in an unsatisfactory house of her own with her post-yuppie husband, the abstracted, non-touchy Peter (Jamey Sheridan), and their little boys, who are there as reminders of the adorable tyke Sam must have been before the divorce. There are a couple of other characters whose houses come into play: the uptight, comic foil antagonist (Sam Robards), upon whose lawn George’s dog performs his critic’s function, and the blowsy, sluttish Coleen (Mary Steenburgen), George’s next-door neighbor, and her pretty, sluttish sixteen-year-old daughter Alyssa (Jena Malone).
Eventually they all (except Robards) come together and build the house. George wins them over by the force of his enthusiasm and rediscovered capacity for caring, withholding as long as possible the news of his condition. The eye makeup and piercings disappear from Sam, the frost thaws from Robin and is replaced by the renewed stirrings of lost love, the house rises up over the Pacific, and none of this is to give away anything you wouldn’t have glommed onto from frame one. There are few surprises (except for a labored one at the end) in the screenplay by Mark Andrus, who once wrote “As Good as It Gets” but seems to have fallen on hard creative times, and no surprises at all from producer-turned director Irwin Winkler.
The redeeming features of this movie come from the actors, led by Kline, who manages to do the obvious in unexpected way. Christensen, who is soon to be Anakin Skywalker when the Star Wars cycle returns to the screen, is handsome and brooding as the teen reclamation project. Scott Thomas projects a vulnerable coolness, and retains her bone china beauty despite some unflattering lighting from the great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who has reserved his caresses here for the sunrises and sunsets that dominate the Pacific horizon most of the time. There’s been some talk about an Oscar for Kline, and lord knows he deserves one, but not for this; acting brilliance needs quality writing to complete that recipe, and here the combination is one ingredient short. There is a striking similarity between “House” and another current release, “My First Mister”, which also features a middle-aged man with a mysterious terminal illness reclaiming a pierced, purple-haired, kohl-eyed teenager for the mainstream. Neither movie works, so it may be time for a moratorium on that plot.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
