The Skeleton Twins (2014)

The Skeleton Twins arrives from 2014, a small Sundance dramedy in which Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig play estranged twins who attempt to end their lives on the same afternoon. Craig Johnson directed it, the Duplass brothers produced it, and the festival handed over a screenwriting prize. The film's temperament is Hal Ashby by way of Alexander Payne: modest, observational, allergic to grand statements. It finds jokes in a suicide ward and warmth in a marriage built on contraception and lies. The movie wants to be liked, and it mostly succeeds.

Milo is gay. That fact organizes a good deal of the plot, from a teenage affair with his high school English teacher, a man now closeted in a different way, to the reunion that curdles into shame and recrimination. The film treats this as human wreckage, not as a position paper. There is no speech about acceptance, no lesson delivered to the audience. The cast is overwhelmingly white, with Adriane Lenox appearing briefly as a doctor and nothing made of it. Maggie cheats, lies, and wants things she will not name, which makes her a person instead of a thesis.

The rest of the ledger is quiet. No climate sermon, no class rage, no body politics, no vocabulary borrowed from the clinic. Depression and self-destruction sit in nearly every scene, and the film declines to diagnose them. Instead we get a lip sync to Starship and a fish tank. The picture has no interest in instructing anyone. It would like to sit with you and be sad for a while, and it does.