MEN DON’T LEAVE
With Jessica Lange, Chris O’Donnell, Charlie Korsmo, Arliss Howard, Joan Cusack, and Kathy Bates.
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Risky Business was a cynical teen pic with a bite in its tail, brilliantly realized yet also rather glib; there the cheerfully rattling and pulsing minimalist score was a perfect match for the complacencies of the story. Men Don’t Leave, which is far from cynical, sets out to tackle a genre with much richer possibilities–the soap opera or domestic weepie–and succeeds almost as well in certain respects; here the music is associated with the movie’s most sentimental character, a musician-composer who provides a steady flow of nonaggressive warmth, charisma, and support that is as fixed and as reliable as his music.
The new movie seems less specifically tied to the moods and preoccupations of a specific moment (i.e., the present), and the fleeting dreams it conjures up are more a matter of memory and anxiety. Its subject is the emotional crisis brought about in a family by the accidental death of the father (Tom Mason): the gradually unraveling effects of this on the mother, Beth Macauley (Jessica Lange), and the two sons, a moody boy of ten named Matt (Charlie Korsmo) and his surly older brother Chris (Chris O’Donnell). The family have to sell their suburban house to pay off debts and move a couple of hours away to Baltimore so that Beth can find more lucrative work. Charles (Arliss Howard), a divorced musician, is the substitute father figure who eventually comes into the picture.
Many of these moments consist of behavioral observations in the script or performances: Chris’s starchy discomfort when Jody invites him to dinner and then takes him for a drive, and his tears when he urges Charles to see more of Beth; Matt’s defensive way of saying grace by himself at meals; Jody’s switch from the bedside manner of first person plural (“Why are we so groggy?”) to second person in order to elicit a response from Beth after she has stayed in bed for five days. Even if one remains unsatisfied with how Men Don’t Leave winds up, the movie is studded with small beauties throughout, provoking hopes that we won’t have to wait seven more years for Brickman’s next feature.
