Not exactly the happiest movie, it's a suburban drama along the lines of The Ice Storm or American Beauty combining dark humour with tragedy just not quite as well as those movies did.Still strong performances especially from Sigourney Weaver who gives a penetrating portrait as the mother of this dysfunctional clan as we follow year in the life of her family, left devastated by the suicide of the eldest son, a champion swimmer. Jeff Daniels is, wow, quite an a-hole here. Very unlikeable and unredeemed by the end. He shows his pain by verbally striking out at his family. Emile Hirshe is young here but does a fantastic job and I really enjoyed the relationship he had with his mother. 8/20/14

This film is a great example of a storyteller who doesn't understand the story that he's telling. I know that sounds like an absurd thing to allege. How can the guy telling the tale not understand it? However, it's the only way I can explain the bizarrely wrong emotional focus and characterizations on display in Imaginary Heroes. Writer/director Dan Harris is like a cook who set out to make an apple pie, yet tried to make it with kumquats and licorice. You might be able to make something oddly tasty out of those ingredients, but not by following an apple pie recipe. This movie has the structure and style of a by-the-numbers tale of 21st century suburban angst stuck in between a beginning which unknowingly negates its own premise and an ending with an escalating series of ridiculous revelations that even Harris can't keep up with. Things start out with 17 year old Tim Travis (Emile Hirsch) telling us that his older brother Matt (Kip Pardue) killed himself because he was incredibly great at swimming at the same time he hated swimming more than anything else in the world. Now, I have to confess, this opening with Tim's narration of images of Matt put me off this film right away, long before any of the other flaws reared their head. I can imagine someone hating the obsessive demands of competitive sports or the pressure of competition. How the hell does anyone hate the act of swimming enough to commit suicide? If you really disliked it that much, you'd stop swimming when you were too young for anyone to know you were any good at it. To say that Matt killed himself because he hated swimming is a ludicrously simplistic description of a much more complex dynamic, and if the point of Tim describing it like that would have been to illustrate how ludicrously simplistic Tim's thinking or view of the world is…that might have been interesting. Unfortunately, every example of human behavior in this movie is as ludicrously simplistic as Tim's analysis of his brother offing himself.Even if I'm overreacting to that, the rest of Imaginary Heroes still isn't any good. It starts off with suicide and then focuses on the characters least affected by that tragedy. Tim and his mom, Sandy (Sigourney Weaver), go about with their unimaginatively angsty suburban lives and there's no meaningful connection between anything they do and what happened to Matt. The only one who is affected by it is Tim's dad, Ben (Jeff Daniels), and he's a terribly written character who only exists to serve the Almighty Plot Hammer. Ben switches from resentful bastard to fumbling, desperate, nice guy to wounded father to suit whatever particular scene Tim and Sandy are in at the moment. In this script, Tim and Sandy are meant to be actual human beings while Ben is never considered as more than a prop.At least Ben gets a decent amount of screen time servicing Tim and Sandy's narratives. Tim also has an older sister, Penny (Michelle Williams), and I haven't the foggiest idea what this character is doing in this movie at all. Her existence has no purpose or function and she contributes nothing to the story. She's dead weight that should have been cut out of the screenplay very early on in the process and is another glaring example of how filmmakers occasionally need someone to tell them "no". Penny isn't nearly as glaring a necessary deletion as Jar Jar Binks, but I'd say she's about a .4 on the Binks scale.There isn't much of a plot to Imaginary Heroes. Stuff just happens. Most of it's boring and I could go on and on about how what isn't boring doesn't make any sense. I just want to focus on one big, whanging crazy thing. This is going to spoil a significant aspect of the film, so if you haven't seen it and ever plan to…stop reading now.Okay, here it comes. After having some sort of drug addled sex with his best friend Kyle (Ryan Donowho), Tim eventually discovers that Ben, the father who's never liked him and treated him like crap his whole life, isn't his biological father. It turns out Sandy had an affair with Kyle's dad and that's how she got pregnant with Tim. Now, which of these do you think would be more traumatic?1. Finding out the son of a bitch who's made your life miserable isn't your real father?2. Finding out you just boinked your half-brother?Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think the whole "you screwed your half-brother" situation would be a much, much bigger deal. Once the secret of Tim's parentage is revealed, though, no one and nothing in the movie ever references or even alludes to the whole "sex with your half-brother" thing. There's a very big fuss made of Ben not being Tim's real dad, but Tim shtupping a blood relative gets flushed down the memory hole and is never seen or heard from again. Am I wrong about this? Is finding out that you essentially were the product of a sperm donor more disturbing than being told you've ignorantly committed incest?I don't know what else I can tell you about Imaginary Heroes. The parts of this film that aren't boring are wildly and weirdly ill considered. Unless you like kumquats and licorice with a nice, flaky crust…don't bother with this movie.

Another slice of darkness and denial hiding beneath the surface of American suburbia, Imaginary Heroes chronicles the lives of the Travis family, all recovering following the suicide of their eldest son.The pair at the center of the film is mother and son Sandy (Sigourney Weaver) and Tim (Emile Hirsch), both acting out in different ways as a result of the death. While Tim experiments with prescription medication and his own sexuality, Sandy regresses to her former self, smoking marijuana and coming to terms with an old act of infidelity.The relationship between Sandy and Tim is explored well, especially when references are made to both of them being outcast from their own family: Sandy due to her affair and Tim, initially, due to always being in the shadow of his more successful older brother. Considerably less time is allowed for Sandy's husband Ben (Jeff Daniels) who, in a devastating depiction of denial, orders Sandy to make an additional plate of food for his dead son and place it in his old spot at the dinner table. Michelle Williams' older sister Penny is underwritten and could easily be taken out of the film.Despite its long runtime, Imaginary Heroes doesn't explore its many subplots as much as the individual stories deserve, while some of the movie's black comedy doesn't translate as well as writer/director Dan Harris may have liked. And the depiction of a disturbed family dynamic isn't depicted as strongly as the many other films out there with similar ideas. But despite some issues, the central performances from Weaver and Hirsch are stunning, and easily carry the film to its successfully subdued conclusion.Rating: B-

Watching this film is often not a pleasant experience, but then it isn't meant to be. The main protagonist, Tim, seems very passive - a sort of 'everyman' character, pushed around by life - whereas I wanted to slap both his mother and his father more than once. However as the film went on it became obvious that everyone had a good reason for behaving the way they did; everyone was harbouring a secret, and sometimes more than one. I don't agree with the other commenters who felt the ending was too neat; there was at least one major plot-line unresolved - i.e., what happens to Tim's relationship with Kyle in the light of Tim's new knowledge about his father? The whole Tim/Kyle dynamic was beautifully done. Their immaturity in dealing with their feelings for one another worked superbly in the context of their ages. It also informed the darker thread of Tim's relationship with Matt, and if there's a standout performance in the film for me it has to be Kip Pardue playing against type as the tortured older brother.The only quibble I have is that I couldn't quite see why Sigourney Weaver and Jeff Daniels, as the parents, would ever have been attracted to one another in the first place. They were both excellent, but somehow just failed to convince me that they ever were or ever could have been a married couple.It's an uncomfortable film, certainly not a compilation of familiar clichés, but it has a lot in common with "Monster's Ball" in the way it stays in the memory, provokes thought, and ultimately gives one hope even for the most dysfunctional of relationships.