DRAMA; 1hr 33min
STARRING: Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader
Going straight: Wiig and Hader
Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids) is such a funny woman and like all great comedians, she’s not afraid of underlying darkness. There’s plenty of that in The Skeleton Twins’ dappled mix: for starters, although Maggie (Wiig) and her once-close twin, Milo (Superbad ’s Hader, no slouch himself in the crack-up stakes), have a 10-year wedge between them and live on opposite sides of the country, they’re both, spookily, suicidal on the same day. Milo, gay and broken-hearted, is more splashy about it and fetches up in hospital. Maggie, drowning in her suburban marriage to clueless, genial Lance (Luke Wilson), is straight-faced secretive to a self-punishing fault.
As Maggie and Milo’s backstory unfolds in stinging increments from director Craig Johnson, their mother, Judy (Joanna Gleason), is revealed as flaky and useless, Milo is still reeling from a high-school affair with an exploitative English teacher (Ty Burrell), and Maggie, terrified of the pregnancy that Lance mistakenly believes they both want, fools around with other men. Their shot at happiness looks painfully slim, yet the twins’ rediscovery of each other and themselves is a tiny, fractured miracle whose ragged fragments dovetail into a batty and perversely affirming whole.
