The lead in Igby Goes Down (2002) is the youngest son of a wealthy New York City couple. He has an older brother (“young fascist”), a father (now residing in a “befuddlement home”), a godfather (“D.H., who is amazing. His mind functions only to make money. He thinks he has everything he could possibly want, so he walks around acting the way he thinks a happy and content man should act. He’s a parody.”), and Mimi (“Why do I call my mother Mimi? Because ‘Medea‘ was already taken.”).
And this is the story of how a boy who witnessed his father’s permanent breakdown handles the pressures of conformity and exacting expectations: by becoming a nihilistic, occasionally funny, contrarian. Repelled by learning, as it only seems to lead to fulfilling Mimi’s expectations, he bounces from incident to incident, occasionally getting laid (gah!), eventually reaching the level of drug dealer.
And then Mimi, ill with breast cancer, announces she wants her sons to kill her.
A sometimes mystifying film, it seems to be a condemnation of the underside of high society, the schemes, the constant pressure to achieve in order to thrive in a society of perhaps dubious value – the single minded pursuit of wealth, and how it can break people in more than one way.
And whether you want to be part of that.
