Thumbsucker- Kicking the habit is painful to watch

It is a bit hard to fathom what audience the new 'indie family film' genre — and in particular, Mike Mills' first serious film, "Thumbsucker" — is designed to appeal to. One or two films, most notably "Junebug," have risen above their class. However, it seems that the earnest middle-class suburbanites to whom traditional heartwarming family films cater would meet the unyielding quirkiness and sheer hyperactivity of the genre (and this film in particular) with more of a desire to medicate than to admire. Similarly, the standard art film audience is unlikely to be impressed by the genre's encyclopedic habit of including the full range of social ills confronting contemporary families and its somewhat cheap construction of characters. Perhaps, then, the best guess at this film's significance is that it is meant to presage and precipitate the decline of a genre it typifies.

Nonetheless, "Thumbsucker" has its strengths, and offers a somewhat clever conceit. A typically alienated seventeen-year-old boy is forced to struggle with his age-inappropriate and dentally problematic tendency to rely on his thumb for oral comfort. Through a maze of mistakes and confusion, he realizes that his relatively harmless idiosyncrasy is more a mark of his lovable humanity than of social awkwardness. Enjoyable, too, is the visual creativity and crisp photography. It leads a viewer to conclude that Mills belongs behind a camera, not writing scripts, and that novelist Walter Kirn (on whose novel of the same name the film is based) would probably do well to skip further entanglement in the film industry. Despite its weaknesses, however, the film raises some interesting questions about the role of psychosomatic medication in changing the experience of youth and isolation. Nonetheless, the film's wince-filled progression is due less to a clever exposition of growing pains than to the awkwardness of its weakly drawn characters, inconsistent acting and somewhat stilted dialogue.

None of which is to say that dropping by the Princeton Garden Theatre for some quirky entertainment this weekend is such an awful idea. The film is rarely boring, and may even stimulate some conversation. But don't expect a deeply emotional or hugely enjoyable experience. This is, as many films that play in town are, a passable space and time filler, both for the Garden — which is showing it this weekend — as well as for the audiences who go to see it.