The Skeleton Twins (2014)

*** out of ****

When you stick Bill Hader, Kristen Wig and Luke Wilson in a movie about twins suffering from emotional issues, you would probably expect a raucous comedy full of inappropriate situations, potty jokes and semi-slapstick humor. What “The Skeleton Twins” gives us instead is a touching story, deep and realistic characters, and an insightful look at how everybody wrestles with life.

Twins Milo and Maggie Dean (Hader and Wig) are 30-something twins that haven't spoken for a decade. He is an unsuccessful gay actor living in Los Angeles while his sister is a upstate New York sex addict married to a genuine but extremely unintelligent contractor (Luke Wilson). As we meet them, she is girding herself to swallow a handful of pills in her bathroom when she receives a call from a hospital telling her that her brother had cut his wrists in a bathtub. The only reason he survived is that a neighbor complained about the volume of his stereo and the landlord came by.

She brings Milo back home with her and offers to let him stay while he recovers. She is still living in the same small town where they grew up, and being back raises a lot of old feelings for Milo. As a youth he had believed that he would blossom after high school and look down his nose on all those jocks that ended up working in a garage; but he now feels like he was the one that peaked in high school.  But being back in the old home town, he finds he can still relate to the hopeful teen he once was.

Meanwhile Maggie seems a much bigger mess. She has been having affairs on her husband, not for lack of attentiveness from him, but because of a deep self destructive streak that she has never dealt with. Her husband (Wilson) wants to have children but she has secretly continued using birth control;  she feels unworthy both of being a mother and of her husband's love. Add to that, of course, the many trysts she has leaves her afraid that any pregnancy would result in a baby fathered by someone else.

Aside from the plot elements, the real magic of this film is in the relationship between Milo and Maggie. Though they hadn't seen each other in years, they quickly fall back into sibling-speak, having conversations that anyone else would find wildly inappropriate and just loving each other. Later, when it's exposed that the reason for their decade-long estrangement was her exposure of his affair with a high school teacher (which cost the teacher his job), their relationship starts to get complicated again and both start back down the same self destructive paths. But the dialogue they share onscreen is truly wonderful; funny, ironic and just flat out fun to watch. And part of that fun comes from the deep pain we know that both characters suffer.  A particular scene where they lip-synch Starship's "Nothin's Gonna Stop Us Now" is not only crazy fun, but also heartachingly real.  You can easily see them doing the same thing 20 years earlier.

Even Milo's suicide note at the start of the movie shows how disassociated he had become. It read, “To whom it may concern. See ya later. Milo.” Maggie feels the same disassociation..... could it be because they were the missing pieces of each others lives that they needed to be happy? The film doesn't become too analytical or deep in trying to analyze that, but it's plain to be seen. But can they overcome their personal issues to offer that kind of support to each other again?

I have never been an especially big fan of the two principal actors in “The Skeleton Twins” but thoroughly enjoyed both of them here. A surprisingly good and touching film. Highly recommended.