Kid's tainted world

Burr Steers's movie is unquestionably the bestacted of the week. Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Clare Danes and Amanda Peet (also in Identity, released this week) act up a storm and breathe real life into complex characters.

And Kieran Culkin is terrific as the eponymous Igby, a precocious, capricious, contagiously attractive rich kid with a smart mouth that makes you want to slap him silly. Which is just what several people (male and female) are moved to do throughout.

The film opens with a hideous act of matricide. Whether this is a manifestation of calibrated cruelty or a desperate act of filial love is a question that lies quivering in the film's underbelly until the end. What is clear is that we have entered Whit Stillman-ville and that this is the tainted side of his Metropolitan.

As a child, Igby, while brushing his teeth, witnessed his father ( Pullman) suffering a spectacular nervous breakdown in the shower, and has grown up with a hatred of his pill-popping mother (Sarandon) and a deep-seated fear that he is heading into the same dark universe that destroyed his pater. ("You call your mother Mimi?" asks Danes's character; "The Heinous One is a bit cumbersome," retorts Culkin," and Medea was already taken.")

As a result he flunks his way through a series of very expensive schools and a military academy before running away to New York to stay with his godfather's mistress in her huge loft apartment.

The tale is as much about a recovering melancholic as it is about false-gene syndrome, while the upscale milieu - The Hamptons, the safe side of Manhattan, glitterati parties - is confidently observed without interfering unduly with the narrative. As a nephew of Gore Vidal and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, writer/director Steers should know whereof he describes.

The problem here is the film's maladroit structure. It reads like a rambling screen version of a John Irving novel - one of those character-laden meditations on dysfunctional families that are fitfully interesting without being satisfying. The literary tone - two spectres that resonate are Catcher in the Rye and early Easton Ellis - is understandable when we know that Steers's screenplay began life as a novel that was never completed.

There are sporadic pleasures. Culkin is consistently convincing as Igby in a role that might once have been taken by River Phoenix.

Ryan Phillippe is astonishingly good as his glacial elder brother, destined for a career in Rightwing politics, law or industry and conceivably all three.

Peet and Danes are the dark and light female characters that enter Igby's burgeoning sexual universe and Goldblum provides a rare glimpse of his singular skills.