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Milwaukee Film Fest 2018: IDEAL HOME

Milwaukee Film Fest 2018: IDEAL HOME

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Milwaukee Film Fest: IDEAL HOME

In Ideal Home, Steve Coogan and Paul Rudd play a Santa Fe-based, upper-middle class, upper-middle aged gay couple whose relationship is rigidly tumultuous. Flare ups are regular and often involve empty threats to leave each other — that they work together, on a Food Network adjacent program, doesn’t help matters.

When Erasmus’ (Coogan) grandson, and child of his estranged son, shows up in the middle of a dinner party (attended by Food TV stars of note, such as Alex Guarnaschelli), the film asks the tired question, “Will their relationship be saved by the presence of a child, or will it crumble beneath the pressure?” It plays as a sort of mashup of Big Daddy and The Kids Are Alright; think of it as Bougie Daddies.

Stuck in Time

The film, written and directed by Andrew Fleming, who has spent the better part of the last 15 years directing comedic TV programs and, previous to that, helmed cable-rotation classics Dick and The Craft, was inspired by a similar situation from Fleming’s life.

Milwaukee Film Fest: IDEAL HOME
source: Brainstorm Media

This milieu (successful and/or famous upper-aged white people) and scenario (domestic troubles) is the kind of thing Nancy Meyers has made a career out of. While not always successful, in a film like It’s Complicated, she finds a way to traverse formula traps without foregoing real melancholy and sweetness.

Although the wealthy Santa Fe decor is as visually pleasing to navigate as Meyers’ east coast kitchens, Fleming isn’t able to keep up with the emotional weight of Meyers’ best work nor the character charisma even her failures have in spades (i.e. What Women Want and The Holiday). The director said real-life friends Rudd and Coogan had a lot of fun filming Ideal Home, but I rarely had fun watching them. Rudd doesn’t have the dramatic chops of his friend and, like in many of his strict comedies, he often appears to be delivering a line that’s much funnier in his head than on the screen.

Untapped Potential

When the kid reveals, during another of many dinner parties, the troubled history of his parents (one in jail, one dying of a drug overdose), it feels like the film is ramping up to an exploration of the class tensions between him and the bourgeois environment he’s now entombed in. This thread would be bolstered by an ongoing gag wherein the boy will only eat Taco Bell’s crunchwrap supreme with bacon. Obviously contrasted with his guardians’ career and taste in high cuisine, this joke has some mileage, but Fleming never ends up using it, instead allowing it to become an unfortunate dangling modifier.

Milwaukee Film Fest: IDEAL HOME
source: Brainstorm Media

For The Guardian, Simran Hans took the film to task for feeling incredibly dated, saying, “Every joke’s punchline is that these characters are gay, making it difficult to understand who exactly, in 2018, the film hopes to make laugh,” and quotes such “punchlines” as “like the gay Butch Cassidy, but not butch.” This would certainly jibe the fact that Fleming has admitted the Ideal Home script was a previously shelved idea, but one would think he would update it for 2018. If I were to entertain armchair psychology, I would suggest that perhaps the film’s retrograde vernacular speaks more to Fleming’s own class status, which presumably hasn’t changed much in the last decade.

Beyond the characterization, what spoke more to me as awfully dated was the late-film use of Sufjan Stevens’ 2003 banjo ballad “For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti” over an emotional, climactic montage. Besides an assault on my personal taste, using such a cutesy, twee indie song from an artist like Sufjan Stevens (in general, let alone the year after Call Me By Your Name) somehow feels more antiquated than climactic uses of Sigur Rós.

Ideal Home: Conclusion

If I were to highlight one aspect Fleming merits praise for, it’s the subtle, proper way he doles out useful exposition. For instance, we learn we’re in Albuquerque when a policeman addresses himself as Albuquerque P.D., or we know we’re in Santa Fe during a funny discussion about the regional architecture, or the way we find out how long Rudd and Coogan’s couple has been together is revealed when the latter has a conversation with his estranged son. These are nice touches, but at the same time, even mentioning it feels a bit like giving Fleming a gold star.

Ideal Home is now available on home video.

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