The Chumscrubber (2005)

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Disaffected teens, self-absorbed parents, festering dysfunction erupting in violence yep, in Chumscrubber, a black comedy with surrealistic touches firmly in the mold of American Beauty, we’re back in that prefab gulag known as suburbia. The accomplished but overly familiar directorial debut of Arie Posen, this 2005 Sundance Film Festival favorite isn’t nearly as daring or novel as Posen and screenwriter Zac Stanford seem to believe, but it has just enough scathing wit, absurdist flourishes, and pathos to make it noteworthy.

The talented Jamie Bell of Billy Elliot fame heads Chumscrubber’s excellent cast as high school outcast Dean Stiffle. Friendless except for his next-door neighbor drug dealer Troy (Josh Janowicz), Dean drifts through school in a medicated haze, just like everyone else in the subdivision of Hillside. In fact, Hillside is virtually awash in pharmaceuticals and psychotropics, not to mention touchy feely bromides and vitamin supplements the latter sold by Dean’s scarily efficient mother (Allison Janney).

So when Troy’s suicide cuts off the supply of drugs to Dean’s classmates Billy (Justin Chatwin), Crystal (Camilla Belle), and Lou (Lou Taylor Pucci), they try to bully Dean into retrieving Troy’s stash from his room. Unless he sneaks past Troy’s unhinged mother (Glenn Close) to steal the pills, they’ll kidnap his younger brother Charlie (Rory Culkin).

But things go wrong when they nab the wrong Charlie (Thomas Curtis), and his control freak of a mother (Rita Wilson) is too busy planning her wedding to the mayor (Ralph Fiennes) to realize her son is missing. Meanwhile, Dean keeps popping anti-depressants prescribed by his therapist father (William Fitchner), who’s more interested in hawking his latest self-help book than helping his son cope with the death of his only friend.

The title refers to a video game television character the sole survivor of nuclear Armageddon who uses his own severed head to fight off suburbanites turned zombies. Although Posen doesn’t explicitly draw any parallels between the title character and Bell’s anti hero, it’s pretty obvious that Dean and the other teenaged characters identify with the Chumscrubber, who only stays alive by detaching his head from his heart.

Thankfully, Posen shows comparatively more restraint in depicting suburbia’s chilling effect on people’s emotional lives. There are some haunting, ineffably sad moments in the film that jibe surprisingly well with its acid etched satirical humor. While some of the minor characters border on cartoonish, such as Lou’s parents (Jason Isaacs and Caroline Goodall), Posen clearly has a tremendous empathy for almost all of his adult and teenaged protagonists.

In one of the film’s most arresting scenes, Janney quietly reveals the confusion and regret beneath her character’s sunny façade to Bell. Here, and in several other scenes, Posen demonstrates that he absorbed one of the lessons the late, great Billy Wilder imparted to him during a mentorship that began when Posen was in high school. “Never condemn your characters.” Now that he’s tackled the madness that is suburbia a theme apparently irresistible to twentysomething filmmakers like himself, Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko), and Dan Harris (Imaginary Heroes) Posen will hopefully put his mentor’s advice to use on a project ultimately less derivative than Chumscrubber.

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