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The Safety of Objects (R) (121 min.) - Rose Troche's film is another multicharacter peek at the underbelly of suburban America, a topic turned into cliches since The Swimmer started it all in 1968. Manicured lawns and two-story designer homes always hide another minidrama on the other side of the hedges or behind a bedroom door down the hallway.
The Safety of Objects is based on a series of short stories by A.M. Homes about four households in one of those aesthetically sterile neighborhoods that signals affluence. Family members cross paths in varying degrees of significance with little cumulative effect, unlike American Beauty. This is a movie stuffed with too many characters, too much melodrama and a bad balance of pathos and absurdity that never gives us a clue as to whether it's supposed to be funny or sad.
One household is led by Esther Gold (Glenn Close), a perpetual den mother with an ineffectual husband (Robert Klein), a sexually precocious daughter named Julie (Jessica Campbell) and a son, Paul (Joshua Jackson), left comatose (except in flashbacks) by an accident. Paul was having an affair with an older divorced neighbor, Annette Jennings (Patricia Clarkson).
Another home disguises the troubled marriage of Jim and Susan Train (Dermot Mulroney, Moira Kelly). He's a workaholic lawyer who quit his job and can't admit it. Their young son is having a puberty-inspired "courtship" with a Barbie doll. Next door is Helen Christianson (Mary Kay Place), who wants to spice up her life by having an affair with the swimming pool serviceman Randy (Timothy Olyphant).
That's how it goes in this neighborhood, and goes and goes. Homes' fractured stories aren't braided well enough by Troche to make any of their emotional moments amount to much. The Safety of Objects works only as an excuse for very good actors to enjoy a few scenes of promising material to emote. The performances are solid, but this street is a dramatic cul-de-sac.C
- STEVE PERSALL, Times film critic