What Are You Doing This Weekend? Want to Watch a Movie?

Have you ever left a great film hating it solely because you weren’t the one to write it? That’s exactly what Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins did to me.

The film portrays SNL veterans Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as twins Milo and Maggie Dean. A listless Maggie stands in the bathroom of her Upstate New York home, contemplating suicide by way of a mouthful of sleeping pills when she receives a call that Milo’s been admitted into a Los Angeles hospital after a failed suicide attempt of his own.

Although he hasn’t seen his sister in years, Milo returns to his childhood neighborhood to live with Maggie and her lighthearted jock husband, Lance (Luke Wilson). Their respective returns to neglected pasts are fraught with speed bumps, and watching Milo and Maggie navigate them awkwardly is both bizarre and charming.

In recent months, Hollywood has seen a revival of sorts in this “coming home and forcibly confronting familial issues” dramedy category. Shawn Levy’s This is Where I Leave You and David Dobkin’s The Judge are the most recent films to cover the subject. While This is Where I Leave You attempts to portray perfectly-imperfect characters, The Skeleton Twins shows the darker, more realistic imperfections of humans. It’s in Maggie and Milo’s defects that the film succeeds.

The chemistry between Wiig and Hader is palpable, if a little uncomfortable at times. It’s supposed to be. This is very much a story about two siblings beginning to know each other again. Maggie and Milo slowly become each other’s sounding boards, confiding to one another about their innermost fuck ups and regrets, inching towards a bond that is strong, but far from perfect.

Milo is a lonely, gay struggling actor; Maggie is a wearied housewife and dental assistant. Cheating death on the same day brought them both back together, and what a reunion it is. Through the sludge that has become their lives, Maggie and Milo laugh frequently with self-deprecation and indulge in the occasional lip-sync (their rendition of the 80’s anthem “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” was one of most memorable scenes of the film), making them human and relatable, despite the reality that a films’ audience will always have circumstantial differences.

And that’s the thing the film does best – it captures the unnerving doubts that all of us have and reveals the things we do to cope, then forces us to confront them, and hopefully laugh. I left the film feeling a little bit delirious, slightly depressed, hungry for something, and with a strong inclination to call my brother.