Lymelife

Derick Martini’s Lymelife is The Ice Storm melted into warm slush, as a repressed family of upstate New York suburbanites deal with sexual curiosity, adult infidelity, Lyme disease and inconsistent pop-culture references in the late 1970s. Rory Culkin (Signs) is even made up to look like Elijah Wood’s The Ice Storm character; he plays Scott, a Han Solo-haired 15-year-old Catholic watching his parents’ marriage disintegrate. Alec Baldwin plays the philandering architect father, Cynthia Nixon is the secretary he’s having an affair with and Timothy Hutton is the Lyme disease-afflicted cuckold-next-door. Lymelife is an unfortunate mess—the performances feel false, the story is contrived mush and the points about the fakeness of suburbia are pathetically familiar. Lymelife manages to both rip off the ending from American Beauty and make it even more craven.