Parents

Bob Balaban 1988

Among Bob Balaban's many arresting character roles are Orr, the sniggering gnome with a cunning plan in Catch-22 (1970), the mild-mannered friend to William Hurt's "arrogant, high-handed prick" of a Faustian psychologist in Altered States (1980) and, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the interpreter and cartographer who, like the characters played by Teri Garr and François Truffaut, would have made a more interesting protagonist than that film's standard Spielbergian Everymanchild. Parents, which does with family values what Orr habitually did with the USAAF's B-25s, was the first film Balaban directed.

In the 1950s the Laemle family, whose surname evokes the producer of Universal Studios' pioneering 1930s monster films, moves into a new house. Dad (all-American ogre Randy Quaid) is an assiduous corporate climber in a company which is apparently making ready to beget Agent Orange, while Mom (Mary Beth Hurt) is a chirpy home-maker, a role model for Stockard Channing's undercover cockroach in Michael Lehmann's contemporaneous and almost equally sane Meet the Applegates. Not unnaturally in the circumstances, the Laemle's young son Michael (Bryan Madorsky) is taciturn, withdrawn and having gory nightmares, which soon spill over into his schoolwork and excite the suspicions of a counsellor (Sandy Dennis). It transpires that Dad and Mom share a secret vice even more disgusting than the bed-play at which Michael catches them smearily red-mouthed.

Abetted by camera-work which accentuates his looming paunch while concealing his eyes behind gleaming glasses, Quaid's performance deftly blurs the borderline between paterfamilial arbitrariness and less orthodox monstrosity. Long before Dad's hidden sins of nonconformity become apparent, his son's bad dreams and watchful silences are eminently justified by sinister oscillations between insincere bluffness and sneering dislike. Although Michael's cheerfully odd girlfriend (Juno Mills-Cockell) encourages him to rebel ("You ask a lot of questions ... I like that in a man"), the coda leaves little doubt as to the truth of Dad's fatherly dictum: however much parents and children may hate each other, they are bound together for life.

Black comedy, as opposed to violence with wisecracks, is about as well understood in Hollywood as balding, bespectacled, bearded short-arses are welcome as leading men, and Parents did not prove blockbuster material. Nevertheless, it's a worthy precursor to the likes of Raw (2016) and We Are What We Are (2010, 2013), and it's to be hoped that the more favourable climate in which these later films emerged will prompt some overdue exhumation, re-consumption and digestion.