There are times where a movie is so endearing that it doesn't really matter what it's about, whether it has a driving narrative, or even what the plot is.
"The Skeleton Twins" is a movie like that, where the leads ("Saturday Night Live" vets Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig) are so at ease with each other that you'd love to just sit there and spend time with them while they have a family game night.
"Twins" is a dramedy that has heavy themes, one whose seriousness is underscored by snark and wit, but whose tone resonates even as the plot occasionally bogs down.
The title characters are estranged siblings who are reconnecting after one of them attempts suicide. As the film starts, it has been a decade since they'd seen each other, but they slip back into each others' lives with the ease of an old shoe.
Milo (Hader) has been defeated by Hollywood, a man who moved to LA with dreams of acting stardom, but along the way found a whole bunch of restaurants that needed servers. Maggie (Wiig) is living the dream in upstate New York, married to a cheerful blue-collar guy named Lance (Luke Wilson), whom she loves but is bored to death with. She spends her time taking classes, then sleeping with her instructors.
When Milo, despondent over a breakup, attempts suicide, Maggie reunites with him and brings him home to stay with her.
We learn that suicide runs in the family; their father killed himself years before, which ended up sparking their estrangement. Maggie entertains thoughts of her own, ones she hides by the appearance of a goal: pregnancy. It's a sham, though: Maggie fears the prospect of motherhood and stays on birth control even as her husband announces their intentions of having a child.
They each have secrets that they tell each other, even knowing they eventually will tell on them; conversely, they also keep other things from each other, and from us the audience as well. Those tidbits are the juiciest; the ones that best explain the neuroses of our main characters and gets inside their heads.
Hader and Wiig are brilliant together, naturally so comfortable with each other that they feel like actual siblings. Without their chemistry the film would likely have slipped into pretension and utter dullness. With them I was riveted, whether they were sitting in Maggie's dental office huffing laughing gas or having an awkward dinner with their new agey mother (Joanna Gleason).
A subplot involving Ty Burrell (TV's "Modern Family") as a man with whom Milo has a past, is an interesting development that pays off in a wonderfully emotional scene late in the movie. I wasn't fully satisfied by the movie's ending, but with characters like this, it is fitting and resonant.
In many ways "Twins" is a romance between an emotionally wounded brother and sister; not romantic love, of course, but unconditional sibling love, of course hallmarked by the fact that they occasionally cannot stand to be in each others' presence.
"The Skeleton Twins" is not a movie with much hype surrounding it, but it's certainly a worthwhile view, a low-key film whose script doesn't always have its best interests at heart, but whose leads demand your attention. It's a winner.