TWISTER
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The second part of the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina applies pretty well to the eccentric Kansas family in Michael Almereyda’s oddball comedy Twister, but in a way that’s only half the story. Not only is the family as a whole unhappy in its own particular way, most of its members are out of whack with themselves, each other, and everybody else too.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The father is Eugene Cleveland (Harry Dean Stanton), a distracted, long-divorced retired multimillionaire who made his fortune in soda pop and miniature-golf courses. His main distraction is courting Virginia (Lois Chiles), the born-again hostess of “Wonderbox,” a local Sunday-morning TV kiddie show that teaches toddlers about “the weather, animals, and God.” Maureen, or Mo (Suzy Amis), his 24-year-old chain-smoking alcoholic daughter, is a crabby recluse who hasn’t quite grown up or broken away from home; she occasionally camps out in the backyard of the family mansion, which borders a golf course. Violet (Lindsay Christman), her illegitimate eight-year-old daughter, seems relatively sane–as does Violet’s father Chris (Dylan McDermott), who has been in Canada for six months but returns as the film opens. Apart from the attention of Lola (Charlaine Woodard), a resourceful black maid who attends the local college, the child is somewhat neglected. The weirdest Cleveland of all is Mo’s kid brother Howdy or Howard (Crispin Glover), a highly affected 21-year-old dandy in leather who composes strange pieces on the guitar and considers himself engaged to Stephanie (Jenny Wright), the daughter of the family’s gardener.
Though Twister was completed last year, its distributor, Vestron, went out of business shortly after it was finished and only a few weeks before it was scheduled to open. While it has subsequently come out on video, the elephants’ graveyard of homeless movies, it also got a second lease on life when New York’s Anthology Film Archives gave it an extended run earlier this year, earning it favorable responses from both the Village Voice and the New York Times and now a limited run at the Film Center.
