Johnson: The Skeleton Twins (2014)

In 2013, suicide became the leading cause of death among middle-aged Americans. No subsequent film has reflected that extraordinary statistic as eloquently as The Skeleton Twins, a dramedy that somehow manages to be entirely about suicide while refusing to treat it as anything especially exceptional at the same time. In two of their best performances, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader play Maggie and Milo, a pair of twins who reunite for the first time in ten years after attempting suicide on the same day. Bunking down in their home town in upstate New York, they proceed to deal with their demons – Maggie’s fiancee Lance (Luke Wilson), Milo’s high school teacher and first lover Rich (Ty Burrell) – in what could easily play out as a fairly generic indie dramedy were it not so unwilling to move beyond the immediate aftermath of their respective suicides, as well as the more distant aftermath of their father’s suicide. Barely back from the grave, Maggie and Milo have a macabre suicidal synergy that allows Wiig and Hader to put in two of their queerest, most awry performances to date, in what turns out to be the perfect fit for their very different but equally compelling taste for microscopic double-takes, microdazes that make every utterance feel oblivious and even indifferent to how it’s going to survive the conversation at hand. Nothing they talk about or latch onto seems to stay in the same place for very long, especially suicide, which makes for a wonderfully slippery comic signature, but also turns suicide itself into a watery, diffuse ambience more than a discrete event, as if all the rivers, pools and baths where people had chosen to end their lives had broken their banks and settled into a digital floodplain that makes recovering from suicide and contemplating suicide amount to more or less the same thing. Executive produced by Jay and Mark Duplass, this is perhaps what the world looks like after mumblecore – one of the most self-annihilating of cinematic movements - as suicide becomes part of the texture of everyday life to an unprecedented extent. And in capturing that new kind of everyday life, The Skeleton Twins feels both more and less empowered than its drab, dour indie ancestors and counterparts – there may be more confidence here in charisma, more confidence in action, but there’s also more confidence in how’s it’s all going to end.