Parents (1989)

Little Michael (Bryan Madorsky) and his parents Lily (Mary Beth Hurt) and Nick (Randy Quaid) have just moved into a new suburb, in a new town, with a new job for Nick and a new school and new people for Michael to be afraid of. Ever since they’ve arrived, the family’s – already humungous – consumption of large masses of meat whose appearance suggests vegetarianism as the only healthy and sane reaction has increased even further. Apparently, they are eating the left-overs from their old freezer, but left-overs from what exactly, Michael is not told.

With a father who seems to boil with a kind of cold rage underneath aggressive 50s Dad manners and a mother whose face seems painted on in a perpetual fake smile, it’s not a surprise Michael’s behaviour is rather strange, and he quickly becomes the pet project of his school counsellor.

However, there’s more going on than rampant meat consumption and a kid confused and threatened by everything, even more than suggestions of animalistic sexuality between his parents to a child’s inability to always quite grasp what the adult world expects of him.

On paper, Bob Balaban’s suburban cannibal film as seen through the eyes of a child is a horror comedy, but most of the things here that are funny are also frightful, oppressive, and at best dominated not by the sort of humour that lightens one’s mood but by one based in the grotesque. Michael’s child’s eye view turns what goes by normality in his very white and very clean (both unhealthily so, and with a seething underbelly of rot, you won’t be surprised to hear) suburb and (so-called) home into a relentless attack of Lynchian strangeness. The grown-up world can already look like a confusing nightmare to any child, so Balaban’s very strict adherence to his kid protagonist’s perspective turns even the theoretically most innocuous parts of his world into sources of danger and all kinds of horror, even before we come to the whole bit about his family actually being cannibals acting out the roles their time and society expects of them with an added bit of extra wrongness.

Parents is an incredibly rich film. I’m not just impressed by the style, taste and intelligence Balaban uses to show the nightmarish aspects of childhood, but also by how far and complex he dares to go in every aspect, not stopping at picturing the idea of the dark underbelly of the most normal, instead emphasising that the upside of normality looks just as rotten to the right eyes. There are also parts of the film that can be read as a comment on a child’s inability to cope with his discovery of his parents’ sexuality; angry stabs at conformism and the brutal oppression through the concept of normality it enacts; and over all hovers the shadow of child abuse. It’s not the kind of comedy that’ll get many laughs out of anyone who isn’t like Michael’s father, I believe. That’s not a failing, mind you, it’s just the sort of film this is, and it’s difficult to imagine it any other way.

This doesn’t mean the film is completely hopeless and dark, though. There are acts of actual humanity here as well, and while the ending suggests something that certainly isn’t closure, this seems to be a film more driven by a wish to artfully express anger and perhaps pain over the world and we who dwell in it than to cynically revel in it.
On the sheer visual, atmospheric and technical level, Parents is a straight-up masterpiece (and frequent readers will know how little I like that term), putting Madorsky’s incredible, fragile performance, Quaid’s creepy, nuanced seething (nobody does barely disguised scorn quite like Quaid here), and Hurt’s teetering at the edge of what might still be a rest of sanity and humanity into the context of a film where every moment looks and feels like the archetype of 50s style suburbia and a living nightmare of oppression and dread at once.


Parents is an incredibly film that doesn’t just stand a bit isolated in its director’s – really rather interesting – filmography, but that seems rather unique in anyone else’s too.