MOVIE REVIEW : Two Perfect ‘Parents,’ Despite the Script

In “Parents” (citywide)--Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt make a perfect pair of all-American ‘50s gargoyles: the suburban mom and dad from hell.

They play Nick and Lily Laemle, two Indiana suburbanites whose distraught tot, Michael (Bryan Madorsky), watches the murderously sunny facade of his home life crumble into bloody madness. The movie crumbles too, into narrative anemia. But the surreally ordinary Quaid and Hurt help keep the facade sunny and murderous, chirpy and loathsome.

They also keep the lawns clipped, the kitchen sparkling, the dining table bounteously heaped with mysterious leftovers. Everything is shiny, shiny . . . except at night, when Michael hears sinister chompings and gurglings.

What goes on in the dark? Quaid, immaculately dull, waggling a golf club, has the supercilious smirk of a secretly naughty football coach, the menacingly modulated charm of “Leave It to Beaver’s” Ward with a bloody cleaver. Hurt looks a bit like a Celeste Holm-Betty White clone on perky pills. She has stiff skirts that flounce and bounce and the stiffer white smiles of a Frigidaire saleswoman with a body in the freezer.

You don’t really need the collection of ‘50s oldies on the sound track, from “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” to “Moments to Remember,” to set the period. These two actors, plus art director Andris Hausmanis and costume designer Arthur Rowsell, nail the ‘50s to the wall immediately.

Unfortunately, screenwriter Christopher Hawthorne hasn’t nailed down anything. He’s just flung another high-concept dart into space, one more marketing hook in search of a movie. The concept has promise. These evilly immaculate parents are symbols of the greed and immorality that can lurk beneath a middle-class facade, the cancer cells of the Eisenhower era, the rot beneath the frozen smile. There’s also the shaggy corpse of a psychological drama about troubled childhoods buried in here somewhere.

The script makes sense only on its own symbolic level; strip away the symbols and the story becomes scatterbrained. Why hasn’t Michael suspected his parents before? Why are they so careless now? Why does the consummate opportunist Nick forbid his son to play with the daughter of his boss? Why does Sandy Dennis’ nosy, blowzy social worker march into the Laemle’s home and go prowling around upstairs and down? Why is Michael so careless with a telltale stolen instrument?

First-time director Bob Balaban gives “Parents” an attractively flashy surface and voluptuously askew camera angles; it was Balaban who dreamed up the idea of setting it in the late ‘50s. But “Parents” looks like the work of bright, well-intentioned people who’ve seen a lot of vacuous, predictable horror movies and become convinced that they could make a vacuous, predictable horror movie, too--with a sociological point.

Unhappily enough, they’ve succeeded . . . completely. Those who prefer their sociological points without vacuous horror movies attached, may walk out famished. “Parents” (MPAA rated R for mature theme and violence) is all leftovers, despite the tasty little tidbits that Quaid and Hurt keep sporadically cooking up: Dad’s spotless collars and loopy grin, Mom’s brittle Cutex-lacquered claws.

‘PARENTS’

A Vestron Pictures/Great American Film Limited partnership presentation. Producer Bonnie Palef. Director Bob Balaban. Script Christopher Hawthorne. Executive producers Mitchell Cannold, Steven Reuther. Camera Ernest Day, Robin Vidgeon. Editor Bill Pankow. Art Director Andris Hausmanis. Music Jonathan Elias. With Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt, Sandy Dennis, Bryan Madorsky, Juno Mills-Cockell.

Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).