The Skeleton Twins

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Craig Johnson/Starring: Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Ty Burrell and Luke Wilson

The Skeleton Twins is pure independent cinema in every atom of every frame. That isn't a knock but it often feels like it was fitted for an independent film suit before it became a movie. But director Craig Johnson's film can't be shrugged off or dismissed as cliched independent fare, for it is humorously morose and terrifically acted. One might expect Saturday Night Live alums Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader to be in over their heads playing twins who have suicidal issues but the most refreshing surprise about the film are the performances, which are affecting, sometimes funny and convincingly somber.

Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig are Milo and Maggie; said twins whose relationship has been displaced by time and geography. We learn the twins haven't seen one another for ten years; estranged not from rancor or a slight but from the natural drift siblings experience over time.

Maggie has just been called to L.A. from her suburban, New York home to be at her brother's side after his failed suicide attempt. It seems a little too coincidental that Maggie should be contemplating suicide just when she receives the phone call about her brother but it's plausible enough, given the eery, almost supernatural bonds twins often share.

She invites him to stay with her in New York and is welcomed by Maggie's husband Lance (Luke Wilson), who seems to be the complete anithesis of everything gay in Milo's personality. As Milo settles into his stay, the siblings and Lance are joined one night for dinner by their new age-besotted mother Judy (Joanna Gleason), whose hokey, spiritual nonsense the twins regard with little more than weary contempt. Maggie makes a point of expressing her disdain for Judy's lousy maternal record, which her mother acknowledges but without contrition. During the course of the film, we learn Milo and Maggie's father committed suicide; a family tragedy from which the twins inherit much psychological baggage.

As Milo finds himself back in his hometown, he visits a former lover, Rich (an excellent Ty Burrell); a former school teacher now bookstore manager. Rich lost his teaching job after his illicit affair with Milo, who was a mere teen-ager at the time. Though the scandal was kept underwraps, Milo's feelings for Rich endure. Rich's reaction to Milo's presence is dismissively hostile, especially after he makes his huband/father status known to him. This hardly discourages Milo as continues to pursue his former lover throughout the story.

We discover Maggie is no happier in her life. Her repeated efforts to have children with Lance have come to naught, which we learn she has sabotaged by secretly taking birth control pills. Though Lance is a good husband--though blandly so--Maggie's dissatisfaction with her marriage is palpable. Maggie also takes classes as an anodyne to the boredom suburban life visits on her. One such class leads to a romance that develops between Maggie and her scuba-diving instructor; a handsome, tattooed Australian or the male incarnation of everything a bored, unfulfilled housewife might desire.

As the story progresses, we see how screwed-up and unhappy the twins are and how they only have objective clarity when considering the other's problems, never their own. Maggie becomes incensed when she learns Milo is seeing his former teacher; a person she sees as seedy while Milo can't understand why his sister witholds truths about her marriage and reluctance to be a mother from Lance.

Some very interesting developments arise. Instead of the film building to a sentimental explosion of forced, tidy outcomes, more unhappy upheaval ensues. A crumb of hope remains but the story clings to messy, open-endedness, which feels truer to life.

We expect Wiig and Hader to handle the film's funnier moments, which they execute with ease but I didn't expect the actors to negotiate the gloomier, more dramatic scenes with power and restraint. Ty Burrell brings so much to the film; his scenes with Hader have urgency, longing and the shame of a life lived dishonestly.

The film makes an honest assessment of the characters and though they seem weighted down by their problems, they are never less than real and make very stupid and very human decisions for which we can empathize. In Craig Johnson's film, we're never allowed to rest where Milo and Maggie are concerned. They are volatile and we're never quite sure how they'll respond to disappointment or the more tragic realities of their lives. Wiig and Hader's performances make for a satisfying film experience even after an ending that seems a little deus ex machina. If it's the film's most glaring misstep, it doesn't scuttle or trivialize what comes before.