Like
I Start Counting!, this film finds Greene keenly interested in the darkly disquieting yet engrossingly valid experiences of youthful development as influenced by psychosocial variables. Here he expands his attention from the child onto a bifurcated narrative directed at both the adults and children, inherently segregated albeit forcibly tied together by familial love, spacial occupation, and various physical, emotional, and spiritual bindings. In one sense, this film is another admirable example of an artist refurbishing the 1950s melodrama into a nightmare through the whiplash of the 1960s. An early scene of Maxie disclosing the truth of her hedonistic lifestyle to her parents is also the film's highlight, as we witness violently triggering information exploding in the faces of these parents who have been complacently deluding themselves into overlooking problems, suppressing discrepancies in gendered expectations from their generation's assumed norms, destroying their entire worldview. The scene is so acutely piercing that it transforms the conflict of traditional melodrama into a horror film, emulating a slippage of bearings across a mere decade of trauma from the evergrowing and estranging counterculture movement.
Greene's film has the audacity to equitably respect both sets of principals’ experiences, without making one of them the clearly-defined identified client or problem figure, at least for the bulk of the narrative. The parents gain our compassion from the nature of their mirage of control ripped like a rug out from under them by their children, but they’re also exposed as accountably neglectful in refusing to engage with their kids around vulnerable topics and generally presenting with curt expressions of invalidation during household exchanges. The dreamy music cues directly forge empathy with the children too- including, perversely, the daughter as she authentically engages in what is subjectively sublime heroin usage with a beau. The scene is portrayed as self-actualizing purity, because, to her, it
is earnest and loving and bridging affinity in this vacuumed moment. The very next scene of erratic aggression swings the pendulum back to Wallach and far away from these youths’ harmonious tranquility, but instead of sobering us
from 'one' with repetitive gravitation as a trick, the filmmakers seem more interested in sobering us to
both viewpoints as intrinsically valid and tragically determinist in their partitioning. Greene thereby refuses to grant any sense of moral safety for the viewer, and forces us to stew in this impotent discomfort right with the characters.
On similarly nebulous terrain, the lack of empathy Maxie greets her parents with is respectfully an undiagnosable murky mixture of environmentally-enforced generational detachment, learned emotional neglect, developmentally-appropriate egocentricity, and artificial selfishness infected from the state of active addiction. It would be easy to hone in on that last reason as a book-shutting prognosis, but the film allots shades of gray to the youth as well as the parents- and reinforces that feeling of helplessness spawning resentment in the way Maxie is verbally condescended to by the parents and therapist and family friends. She’s simultaneously crying out for love, aid, gaining power where she can, and defensively surrendering hope with her magnetism towards growing individualism - another incubus of the ideologically-dependent generation withering away into the abyssal kaleidoscopic alienation of the present.
The other parents’ kid's explanation of his role in the drug game is less multidimensional on the surface, but his nonchalant transparency signals something arguably even more deeply troubling. The lack of social skills, inability to take perspective or share empathy, and a complete unawareness of expectations for his parents’ interventions on a high-stakes moral issue like this -to the point of disregarding all obvious social cues- paints the scene like watching two sets of aliens communicating. His ultimate attempt to sympathize with his mother is equally tragic in its queasy eccentricity of demeanor, for how challenging he finds it to actually engage on an emotional level, instead offering a detached statement of validation on a lethargically-charged impulse of observational 101 emotional awareness gleaned from his mother’s tangible tears rather than extrospective energy felt.
The last act isn’t nearly as successful as a whole, but still effectively illustrates the domestic fallout of guilt and confusion from a family system trying to glue itself back together without the available internal tools despite all the external resources- a clear callback to the best domestic melodramas that deconstruct the generational divide like
Peyton Place or
Rebel Without a Cause. The climax, though, worked marvelously.
The mother's raw explosion of fury and sadness is riveting, but the final shot's 'awakening' for both Maxie and the other family members, respectively, is deliberately and deliciously ambiguous. Greene continues to keep them separate- including this awakening, reflexively in separate shots. This return from a final act of messy 'togetherness' back to inevitable fragmentation is a wonderful joke, but instead of arriving at a 'two halves equals objectivity' thesis, the final image cheekily uses a subjective wide shot over Maxie's shoulder to detail the smallness of these 'other' family members, who are looking back at their daughter with awe and confusion- over what she's experiencing, but also in what to do next themselves!
I love how the implication isn't that the mother's 'tough love' approach is the right one, but that the daughter's transformation (if this is even that) is enigmatically versatile regarding its source... was it just one or all the interventions stacked together, or a pick 'em? Is it due to her own resilience coming out from a place nobody can define, or a secret she now knows the basis of (one that the family is eagerly awaiting to be taught, still foolishly hoping for some palpable method to sweep this powerless isolation under the carpet and return to a life of 'normalcy')? The stunned looks put the family members in their humble place and also crafts an empathetic framing from the camera, which is meeting these people on their level of desperate and loving in their cores. The mother's switch from threats of severance and boiling anger to puppy-dog-eyed yearning speaks to what is really occurring under the iceberg. That final framing shows the family members as they are, just simple people without all the answers, trying their best with what they have. The title card stating "The People Next Door" over them is another considerate jab at keeping them 'right-sized' against the grain of their hyperactive wills, that have been clashing against systems and people they cannot change for as long as they can remember. It's in this state of mutual humility that each will find the non-answer they seek, and there that they individually have a chance to collectively admit their limitations and connect over their desires for intimacy; warts, compromises and all.
