THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS

The stressed-out members of four suburban families grapple with their problems and experience varying degrees of success.

CAST: Glenn Close, Dermot Mulroney, Jessica Campbell, Patricia Clarkson, Joshua Jackson, Moira Kelly, Robert Klein, Timothy Olyphant, Mary Kay Place, Kristen Stewart, Alex House

DIRECTOR: Rose Troche

" ‘The Safety of Objects’ hammers more nails into the undead corpse of the suburban dream. Movies about the Dread Suburbs are so frightening that we wonder why everyone doesn't flee them, like the crowds in the foreground of Japanese monster movies…Troche's tone is so relentlessly, depressingly monotonous that the characters seem trapped in a narrow emotional range. They live out their miserable lives in one lachrymose sequence after another, and for us there is no relief…‘The Safety of Objects’ is like a hike through the swamp of despond, with ennui sticking to our shoes." --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"The movie is unsettling because it refuses to view its characters from a reassuring, judgmental distance. What they do is often inexplicable, grotesque or absurd, and they are, more often than not, estranged from their own feelings, but sympathy for them sprouts around the edges of their world like a persistent weed…These divorces, kidnappings, infidelities and sundry mental disorders, all occurring within a few feet of one another, heard over hedges and glimpsed through windows, should add up to a dour, overwrought soap opera. But Ms. Troche paces the movie with enough artfulness to keep such objections at bay, and the cast treads lightly even through the swampiest emotional terrain." --A.O. Scott, The New York Times

"‘The Safety of Objects’ tries to make something profound and stirring out of an ordinary observation: That life in the suburbs is hell on just about everyone… Although it has moments of charm and poignancy--this is one of Glenn Close's best hours--the scheme and scope of the movie are just too darned obvious…There's little time to really accumulate heft in any one narrative thread. It's always time to go to the next character." --Desson Howe, The Washington Post

"Although deft editing provides neat segues, ‘Safety’ suffers from a case of too many dramas, too little time. Characters are given no chance to develop and, too often, their behavior turns on a dime, hurtling off into a parallel universe of extreme acts…there are altogether too many trite, overly familiar tales of dysfunction…Troche would have done well to leave the sprawling ensemble pieces to pros like Robert Altman and winnow back the number of subplots--making sure to keep on board the protean, always watchable Mulroney." --Megan Lehmann, The New York Post

"Writer-director Troche approaches her characters with unsentimental compassion, and she neatly—but not too neatly—ties together the strands of her complex narrative. Without cynicism or cruelty, she tells some tough truths about the sterility of contemporary American life…In a standout ensemble, special praise is due Glenn Close as a woman whose true strength is not revealed until the very end and to Patricia Clarkson, who makes us feel both the depth of her pain and the valor of her humor. All those triple-named starlets out in far Hollywood could take a lesson from these luminous, giving actresses." Guy Flatley, Moviecrazed

"What we accept in our mind's eye as believable eccentricity on the page can look distractingly whimsical on screen…Although the effort is high-minded and fastidious, each household's longings and itches feel arbitrarily grandiose--and sometimes intrusively kooky --when blown up and in the flesh. But the disciplined performances play against schmaltz, and the casting is inspired." --Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

"Rose Troche's ‘The Safety of Objects’ is too much of a good thing…While Mary Kay Place, as Helen, a middle-age housewife experiencing the slings and arrows of a stale marriage, is as impressive as Glenn Close, Dermot Mulroney and Patricia Clarkson, her character's problems are scarcely earthshaking alongside the crises facing the film's other three principals. In short, ‘The Safety of Objects’ is so intense emotionally that had it come in half an hour earlier it could have retained far greater impact." --Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times

.