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"  Say the word suburbs and it&amp;#039;s less likely to conjure up Desperate Housewives than more nostalgic images, at once idyllic and ironic, of well-tended lawns, kids on bikes, and moms in station wagons and SUVs. But until a decade or so ago the pivotal figures in that iconic American landscape were the ones who spent the least time there: the semiabsent dads who paid for the dream with the money they chased in the city. The Martini brothers\u2014screenwriter Steven and director-cowriter Derick\u2014understand this. Their finely observed movie Lymelife, set in late-&amp;#039;70s Long Island and rooted in personal experience, opens with Scott Bartlett (the youngest Culkin, Rory), a slight, virginal 15-year-old who will soon take a savage beating from a school-yard bully. Scott&amp;#039;s coming-of-age story is a central thread in the narrative; there&amp;#039;s even a scene in which he practices his seduction technique, only to make the singularly unpersuasive line &amp;quot;You know you want it&amp;quot; laugh-out-loud funny. But the movie and most of the characters in it revolve around two dads: Scott&amp;#039;s father, Mickey (Alec Baldwin), a prosperous home builder, and their ailing, out-of-work neighbor Charlie Bragg (Timothy Hutton), parent of the worldly Adrianna (Emma Roberts), for whom Scott carries a flaming torch. One man is a powerhouse, while the other, to the rising panic of his go-getter wife (Cynthia Nixon), has had all his power leached away by the insidious Lyme disease that gives the movie its dry Martini title. Yet one would be hard-pressed to say which family is more miserable. Lymelife doesn&amp;#039;t lack for humor, but the prospect of catastrophe haunts the movie&amp;#039;s edges, just as it has haunted generations of city-fleeing strivers who aspire to live in a place where bad things don&amp;#039;t happen. There is no such place, as the Martinis make clear. Etched with a precision that neither sentimentalizes nor condemns, Lymelife\u2014 which was godfathered by executive producer Martin Scorsese\u2014is a piece of quietly urgent realism. A modest but compelling descendant of Ordinary People, Robert Redford&amp;#039;s stunning 1980 directing debut, it knows a great deal about where a lot of us come from and some of us are still trying to get to. &amp;quot;Privilege is a plywood tree house in a hurricane,&amp;quot; wrote the eloquent New York Times critic Vincent Canby about the well-off family splintered by loss in the Redford film. As Lymelife begins, both the Braggs&amp;#039; marriage and the Bartletts&amp;#039; are starting to fracture. There&amp;#039;s a mindless adultery in there somewhere and once-harmonious partners who are falling out of step. Because we watch them through their children&amp;#039;s eyes, each new stumble threatens worse to come. With one arguable exception, Lymelife doesn&amp;#039;t descend into melodrama, thanks to the Martinis&amp;#039; gift for detail and the pitch-perfect ensemble work of their cast. Baldwin&amp;#039;s Mickey is a classic alpha male whose tin-eared love for his family makes him unexpectedly poignant, while Hutton (the troubled son in Ordinary People) gradually turns Charlie into the kind of walking disaster that people cross the street to avoid. But the revelation is Law &amp;amp;amp; Order veteran Jill Hennessy, who plays Mickey&amp;#039;s wife, Brenda, with a growing air of alienation and a hint of New York City in her voice\u2014something we only realize after Scott&amp;#039;s older brother (Kieran Culkin), home on leave from the army, says of their mother, &amp;quot;She misses Queens and having her women friends around to talk to.&amp;quot; With that one brief line, we suddenly understand much more about Mickey and Brenda, and we see the fault line in their marriage. She&amp;#039;s been a good wife and mother, but they no longer want the same things; she&amp;#039;s not a striver, and the success he&amp;#039;s so proud of is leaving her marooned. The suburbs started losing their cachet 20 years ago to big-windowed lofts in newly revitalized city centers. But they continue to be rich fodder for the movies, whether it&amp;#039;s Connecticut swingers trying to fill the void in their lives in The Ice Storm; the lush, leafy setting of intolerance in Far From Heaven; the hard-edged tragicomedy of American Beauty; or the conformity portrayed with such thunderous contempt in the sarcastically named Revolutionary Road. What feels fresh about Lymelife and sets it apart from its predecessors (some of which are brilliant) is its attitude. For all the worm-in-the-apple implications of its title, the film takes its suburbanites and their yearnings seriously. Even a ragged-looking deer that wanders warily through the picture seems like a portent; there&amp;#039;s no safe place for him, either. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/reviews/a9973/lymelife-308886/>