Parents <\/i>(which opened 30 years ago this month)\u00a0opens <\/i>in extreme close-up on a black-and-white photo of 12-year-old Mike Laemle. The score spells doom with an orchestral chant. But then the band cheers up and little Mike fades away. In his place, the gilded, cookie-cutter sprawl of the American Dream set to Billboard\u2019s No. 1 song of 1955. The film\u2019s rendition of \u201cCherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,\u201d produced by Jonathon Elias and composed by Angelo Badalamenti, preserves the flirtations of the original\u2019s cocktail-hour jazz, but perverts it with an occasional squeal of brass that sounds like a record scratch or a scream, depending on your mood. The title arrives on the mile-wide grille of a 1958 Oldsmobile, only to be ripped apart in its chrome-plated grin.<\/span><\/p>\n Except for the text announcing Randy Quaid\u2019s presence, it could be an industrial film shown to Cold War kids, called something like \u201cThe Suburban Experiment.\u201d Identical houses. Identical lawns. Identical dads practicing putts in identical living rooms. Identical moms frosting identical cakes. This is the Life, same as everyone else\u2019s.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI grew up in a family that was perfect. You had to look perfectly, you had to act perfectly.\u201d In a rare interview about Parents <\/i>for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Bob Balaban revealed that the original script, written by then-employee of the Showtime accounting department Christopher Hawthorne, was set in a more traditional haunted house. It was Bob\u2019s idea to set it in the same kind of suburb where he spent his childhood. \u201cMy whole growing up was about the fear under the normalcy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The Balabans were not bad people, he clarified. And they certainly weren\u2019t cannibals, as far as he knew. But they were living the Life in one of the first, last, and only decades when artificiality was next to godliness. Dad works for a defoliant company that has no problem naming itself Toxico. When he brings Mike to work, the boss takes the boy aside and waxes poetic on the virtues of chemicals the same way Walt Disney would about imagination. They have a morgue in the basement for human testing, and their latest breakthrough is a biological carpet-bomb that destabilizes the ecosystem of unnamed \u201cjungle outposts\u201d enough to be wiped away by monsoons, but hey; it\u2019s a living. <\/span><\/p>\n Mom, meanwhile, cooks. In an era when Jell-O came in celery flavor and encouraged you to hang meat in its candy-colored suspended animation, the food in Parents <\/i>is equal parts sterile and squeamish. When the teacher asks them to draw their respective families, the class turns in almost interchangeable art \u2014 except for little Mike, who grinds his red crayon to death all over his stick-figure parents. It\u2019s subversive enough to get him sent to the school social worker, Ms. Dew, who eventually admits, \u201cI wish I could label him and put him in a box.\u201d Like everybody else. But if she paid more attention to his drawing, she would\u2019ve noticed he already put himself in one.<\/span><\/p>\n What Parents <\/i>manages better than almost any other Suburban-Scooby-Doo story is seeing the world through the wide and wandering eyes of a kid. Every night, when Dad rubs Mom\u2019s shoulders and kisses her neck and tells Mike to go to bed, with hell to pay if he leaves his room, it\u2019s more threat than routine. What are they doing? What are they hiding? <\/i>Any question Mike asks, about dinner or nightmares or his parents wrestling in their underwear, is shut down with one of Dad\u2019s cautionary fairy tales, like the boy who asked too many questions and got his lips stuck together permanently. Kids aren\u2019t allowed to know adults beyond the jobs they complain about and the meatloaves they serve until they reach the imaginary threshold when they mutate into adults themselves.<\/span><\/p>\n When Mike plays grown-up with the girl down the street, Sheila, they can only act out what they\u2019ve seen. She cracks raw eggs into all the chrome-plated kitchen appliances. He replaces a fuse when the mixer blows. She gets into the wine and tells him to take his shirt off. Whatever parents do after that, she wouldn\u2019t know.<\/span><\/p>\n The only adult who\u2019s honest with them is the only adult who listens to them. When Mike asks why Ms. Dew is a social worker and not a psychiatrist, she explains, after a flinch, that she doesn\u2019t have a degree. Mike laughs at her accidental display of genuine frustration and declares her not a real grown-up, because \u201creal grown-ups don\u2019t get upset.\u201d This doesn\u2019t annoy her any less, but it does show a change in the tides. In the 1950s, if you didn\u2019t want the Straight WASP Hat Trick of a home-maker wife, a flawless backswing, and a basement freezer full of beef tips, you were just wrong. No reason to ask you what you actually did <\/i>want.<\/span><\/p>\n Dad can\u2019t stand Mike\u2019s recent vegetarian streak, which Mike sums up with a line that deserves immortality among horror\u2019s finest: \u201cWe\u2019ve had leftovers every day since we moved here. I\u2019d like to know what they were before they were leftovers.\u201d But he\u2019s not furious because his son is misbehaving or refusing to touch the ambiguous meat next to his mashed potatoes; he\u2019s furious because his son isn\u2019t like him.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t look like me. You don\u2019t act like me,\u201d he shouts from the corner of Mike\u2019s bed. \u201cYou hate <\/i>me.\u201d But not according to Mom, who tells Ms. Dew that they get along famously. What do they do together? \u201cMany things,\u201d she bluffs with a smile. \u201cI would have to say many things and just leave it at that.\u201d Boys get along with their dads because that\u2019s what they do<\/i>, because they\u2019re pals.<\/span><\/p>\n By the time the third act rolls around and the bloody checks start cashing, Mom comes to accept that her son is not like her husband. She proves her love the hard way. Dad, though, has no problem throwing out the baby and the bathwater. \u201cWe\u2019ll have another one, Lily. We\u2019ll bring him up right.<\/i>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n When Parents <\/i>reached audiences in 1989, with an ad campaign that teased \u201cA New Name For Terror\u201d like drive-in fodder, they didn\u2019t know what to make of it. Ebert hated it, declaring it had \u201cno other purpose than to disgust.\u201d Siskel, against all odds, enjoyed<\/a> it. \u201cI think this will be a cult film.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The effect might not be crippling terror, but Parents <\/i>deals in a mounting dread that you won\u2019t find anywhere else. Balaban, with cinematographers Ernest Day and Robin Vidgeon, turned the 1950s into a pop-art nightmare. The Laemle house is a chic maze of prison-bar architecture and squiggly wallpaper that melts into white noise over everyone\u2019s shoulder. Adults loom too large. Kids shrink with every cut. That sainted artificial Life might be all the grown-ups have ever wanted, but to someone noticing it for the first time, to someone growing up in it, it\u2019s hell.<\/span><\/p>\n When actor Bob Balaban was gathering a crew for his directorial debut, Parents, a would-be applicant walked in and said, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":11165,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/4549-150x150.jpg\")
That\u2019s great press for any horror movie, but especially for the first feature from an actor who built his entire career on looking like your doctor. Today, Bob Balaban is most recognized as the quiet man in round glasses who shows up in Wes Anderson films or narrates them with a singularly pleasant voice that sounds like a constant, considerate whisper. By the late 1980s, he was already one of the best That Guy character actors in the business. Close Encounters of the Third Kind.<\/i> Absence of Malice. Prince of the City.<\/i> All of it impressive. None of it suggesting he\u2019d want to make a comedy about an atomic family of cannibals in 1950s suburbia. <\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/V669Tp4BunanMEqDQPuVjui389.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/bryanheadshot.jpg\")
They were both wrong. Balaban has no problem talking about Parents<\/i>, but nobody asks about it. Bryan Madorsky, who delicately balanced the entire movie as Little Mike, never acted again. None of its grown-up stars \u2014 Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt, and Sandy Dennis \u2014 carry enough genre clout to bring it up in the usual circles, despite all of them turning in pitch-perfect work. It\u2019s not gory enough for that kind of appreciation, either. Blood runs on occasion and regularly haunts Mike\u2019s abstract dreams, but the only mutilation comes courtesy of an imaginary hand twitching around the garbage disposal. It\u2019s a horror movie with little viscera and fewer jolts. Even the most genre-centric scene \u2014 a Halloween <\/i>riff when someone hides in a pantry dodging a steak knife as it stabs through slats in the door \u2014 plays over music that belongs in a commercial for laundry detergent. <\/span><\/p>\n
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