By Barry Bridges

Infighting among the teens in Arie Posin's The Chumscrubber.

Following in the mould of American Beauty and The Virgin Suicides , Arie Posin's dark insight into middle-America suburbia is a rare commodity indeed: a moral tale of teenage angst that escapes cliche to provide an excellent indictment of Anywhere, USA.

When Troy, Dean's best friend and the town's leading drug dealer, hangs himself in his bedroom his death throws the small community's carefully maintained psychotherapeutic balance into disarray. At school, in an effort to get their hands on Troy's stash, Dean's classmates Billy (Justin Chatwin), Crystal (Camilla Belle) and Lee (Lou Taylor Pucci) plot a kidnapping scheme: they'll abduct Dean's younger brother, Charlie (Rory Culkin) and hold him for random in exchange for Dean retrieving Troy's pills. The problem? They abduct the wrong Charlie.

Set against a backdrop of non-descript Middle-American suburbia, The Chumscrubber follows the lives of Hillside's delinquent teenagers as each seeks to gain closure in their own life. Dean struggles to come to terms with his best friend's suicide, as he battles against an egotistic psychologist father (William Fichtner) whose relationship with his son is premised on commercial exploitation, and a mother trapped in a life-enhancing-drug revolution. Troy's mother (expertly portrayed by Glenn Close) seeks to apportion blame for his tragic death but fails to understand her own role in his demise. Charlie, meanwhile, attempts to fit in with his kidnapper's lifestyle, all the while his mother (Rita Wilson) - oblivious to his capture - battles to salvage her wedding to deranged Mayor Michael Ebbs (Ralph Fiennes).

Director Arie Posin's states from the outset that The Chumscrubber isn't a movie about teenagers: it's a movie that tries to show the world from a teenager's point of view. In this regard, the film stands apart, with Stanford's script expertly capturing the interrelationship of the lives of Hillside's adults and Hillside's youth, each co-existing without interaction; each misunderstanding the other. Glenn Close shines as Troy's bereaved mother, teetering on the edge of sanity as she seeks to blame anyone other than herself for her son's tragic death, while Officer Bratley (John Heard), father to kidnapped Charlie, tries to regain control of his life as he fights a one-man war against the Mayor: his ex-wife‘s future husband. Fiennes is expertly cast in this role, depicting a deranged, maddening figure torn apart by self-analysis stemming from a neurotic fiancee and adulation for the published work of none-other than Dean's own father.

What The Chumscrubber does well, it does very well indeed. The script is well-paced and the performances of Bell, Close, Fiennes and Chatwin ensure that Zac Stanford's skilled characterisation is not wasted. Charlie is captured by a brilliant Thomas Curtis, who acts as the link between several concurrent subplots, providing an insight into each family's search for understanding following Troy's death. With so much going on, Stanford's success in bringing closure to the film mimics the characters' success in bringing closure to their own lives, with an excellent final sequence that ties all subplots together in a cathartic scene of concurrent comedy and tragedy - the two human emotions exploited most fully throughout.

Despite such strengths, the film is not without fault. Carrie-Anne Moss's role is largely superfluous (although well acted) and adds little to the storyline. The director's decision to incorporate CGI into the movie - portraying the PC-game character ‘The Chumscrubber' as a source of negative symbol of teenage disillusionment - harks back to bad memories of ‘ The Beach' , undermining an otherwise credible plot and de-sensitising the audience to the characters' real human emotions. Occasional camera shots lack focus, appearing more like Gap advert than a film. Fortunately, these minor irritations do not detract significantly from the quality of the movie as a whole.

Overall, The Chumscrubber is an excellent film. Despite occasional directional errors and a few superfluous characters, one hopes that this dark and sinister snapshot of human tragedy and emotion achieves the success it deserves, finding its place as a genuinely strong examination of the breakdown in adult/child relations that manages a rare thing these days: to portray a teenage viewpoint without cliche or stereotype.
The Chumscrubber is rated "R" and is currently in limited release in LA and NYC.