These movies are not bad; they range from good to great. But they dramatize a disintegration of native American optimism. You can't make it there, and you can't make it anywhere. Consider Lonesome Jim (Casey Affleck). He went to New York City to be a great writer, although his choice of role models sends up an ominous signal; the photos on the wall of his childhood bedroom, he explains, show victims of alcohol, drugs or suicide, sometimes all three. He ought to have an alternative wall for modern writers who are successful and yet sane, like Don DeLillo, Paul Theroux, Dave Eggers, Rohinton Mistry and Eudora Welty.
But never mind. Jim returns home to Indiana, portrayed here as a sinkhole of failed dreams and nutty losers. This is unfair to Indiana; look what a cherished home the state made for the hero of "A History of Violence." Perhaps Jim would find any state depressing, particularly in a film directed by Steve Buscemi, who is one of the best actors alive and a director of movies, like "Trees Lounge" and this one, in which the heroes are sad sacks. The sad sack played by Buscemi in "Trees Lounge" is at least fueled by resentment and anger and flashes of romantic optimism; Lonesome Jim is mired in the slough of despond. Played by Affleck, he's is in the same hole as his brother, Tim (Kevin Corrigan), who never left home. One brother tells the other: "You're divorced, with a s--- job in a lumberyard, and live with Mom and Dad. I'm a f---up but you're a damn tragedy." Apart from the divorce, this could be either brother describing the other.
Jim moves in with Tim and their mom and dad (Mary Kay Place and Seymour Cassel). Dad is sour and jaundiced. Mom is implacably cheerful, which may be worse. She runs the lumber and ladder works, which her brother, called Evil (Mark Boone Junior), uses as a depot for drug deals. Tim and Jim discuss suicide. Tim runs his car into a tree, and although he survives, Jim has to take over his duties as the coach of a girls basketball team that has not scored a single point in 14 games. Not even Gene Hackman in "Hoosiers" could coach this team to victory. Luckily, Jim's brother's nurse is the sympathetic single mother Anika (Liv Tyler). It happens, Anika and Jim already know each other from a night of sudden sex.
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