The Safety of Objects

A collection of short stories by A.M. Homes is the source for this portrait of the underside of life in a typical middle-class American suburb. Instead of adapting a single tale, however, director Rose Troche (Go Fish) has integrated a number of them, inventing links between characters and incidents. The resultant narrative, one of those intricate multi-perspective roundelays that have proliferated in American independent movies lately, centers on four neighboring families who are introduced, in the clever opening credits, in the form of paper cutouts. Unfortunately, when the actual actors take over, the characters don't seem much more real. The basic problem is that the mixture of tragedy and farce in the wildly divergent storylines doesn't quite jell: one mother (Glenn Close), for example, is obsessively tending to a comatose son, but across the road an adolescent boy is indulging in bizarre fantasies about his sister's dolls, while elsewhere the kidnapping of a child is set against a young lawyer's comic abandonment of his job. While parts of The Safety of Objects work very well, overall the picture seems forced and artificial, a contrived assemblage of plotlines that never converge into a harmonious whole. An optional purchase. (F. Swietek)