Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, playing estranged twins with depression issues, discordantly slip into Saturday Night Live mode once too often during The Skeleton Twins. At the film’s outset Maggie (Wiig) shows up in the hospital room of Milo (Hader) after he unsuccessfully tried to kill himself. The call to inform her of this event, incidentally, interrupted her own suicide attempt. He tells her to go back home. They haven’t conversed in ten years and he’s in no mood to rekindle things now. By the middle of the film the two are huffing nitrous oxide in her dental office (she’s a hygienist) and laughing themselves silly. If you think this scene goes on too long, wait’ll you catch Milo’s pantomime of Jefferson Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” Maggie, a lot more uptight than her brother, eventually joins in while the film’s editor evidentially too a long break when it was time to cut off this scene.
There are moments of resonance in The Skeleton Twins but they are too few and far between to warrant serious praise. Wiig and Hader, who both prove they can be effective dramatic actors, do their best to liven things up but the film relies far too heavily on Luke Wilson as Lance, a stereotypical nice-guy husband. Where Maggie and Milo’s sensibilities seem decidedly urban and wise, Lance projects cornball All-American decent sincerity. And projects it and projects it.
Lance takes Milo, who’s gay, under his wing and gets him a job clearing brush for some sort of dam project Lance is running. When they both need to get away for “man time” he takes Hader out for wall climbing. Meanwhile, Maggie contemplates a dalliance with her young scuba instructor. At one point self-absorbed, blowy mom-from-hell (Joanna Gleason) briefly shows up before Maggie essentially insults her out of the house. We are reminded that Dad (who called them the “gruesome twosome”) offed himself when they were both 14. And just to show that not two but three comedians can do good drama, modern Family’s Ty Burrell plays Milo’s former English teacher, who, essentially, molested him while Milo was 15.
Before one of the least plausible finishes in recent memory, the film’s climactic scene takes place with Milo in full drag for Halloween. Despite this scene of the two siblings battling it out standing out as the film’s best, it manages to be emblematic of writer/director Craig Johnson striving too hard for irony. Nearly lost in the shuffle are the issues of trust and rapprochement between two lost, hurting, self-destructive souls who have each other as the last resort when things get bleak. Blood is finally thicker than desperation but Johnson’s message, contained inside so much unnerving folly and tone shifts, is a blunted one.
Two Outstanding Comedians Show Serious Dramatic Chops In A Less Than Stellar Film… 2.5 (out of 5 stars)