(2002, Dir.: Burr Steers, with Kieran Culkin, Susan Sarandon)

Igby Goes Down is a distasteful little black comedy that revels in the banal immorality of its threadbare characters, then has has the audacity to ask you to care about their self-inflicted (with one cheap exception) pain.

Immoral characters are fine, of course, but they should at least be interesting. A couple of the actors (mostly Susan Sarandon as the self-involved, bitchy matron) try to invest their characters with something to hang on to, but they're swimming upstream. The rest just float out with the current.

Igby (Kieran Culkin, who at least seems to have escaped the destructive fame that his brother endured) is Igby, a foul-mouthed, tired-eyed teen who rebels against his wealthy upbringing. He does this in the most boring way possible: seeking sex, drugs, and possibly to go to California. He briefly rebels in slow-motion, though I wasn't sure why. He is occasionally funny, though that appears to be largely accidental. He becomes tangled up with his godfather's mistress, her stereotyped artist friend (who is lucky enough to get the worst line in the movie, an appalling reference to Anne Frank), and a reprobate bohemian girlfriend, Sookie (Claire Danes). This last relationship provides the worst moment in the film, a tearful confrontation through a locked door (oh, the significance!) that tries to win audience emotion that is totally unearned, because to this point the characters have no reason to have formed an attachment, other than proximity. These two could have Last Tango in Paris sex and you'd think it was a bank transaction. Ryan Phillippe appears as a piece of wood, which I guess is what he was going for. Bill Pullman is Igby's father, the only non-guilty party in the film, mainly because he's schizophrenic, which provides plenty of additional cheap melodrama.

Director Burr Steers (also the writer) is competent, but he uses phony devices (the aforementioned slo-mo, as well as some cheap fade cuts) where he'd be better served just trying to tell a story. Though in the case of this story, perhaps not.