The Device of the Realtor's "Super-Honest" Mentally Ill Son
The interesting actor Michael Shannon picked up an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the mentally ill son of overly solicitous realtor Kathy Bates(and her husband, an actor unknown to me but good in his part.)
Shannon is only in two scenes, but they were duly saluted and he duly got his Oscar nom.
I'm Ok with the Oscar nomination, but a little unsure about the efficacy of his scenes.
Roger Ebert, for one, seemed to be saluting Shannon's character in that "his only real mental illness is that he speaks the truth." Ebert saw the 1955-period character as a precursor to the "truth telling Beatniks" who would attack America's hypocrisy and Establishment ways.
And thus it is in his two scenes, in which he unleashes his opinion about the fakeness of the Wheeler's marriage and their motivations, attacks the very nature of the pregnancy of Kate Winslet's character, and finishes his last appearance by saying the one thing he IS happy about is that he won't be the child that Kate is unhappily carrying in her unhappy marriage to Leo.
As a matter of principle, and decency, I can't quite find myself admiring or saluting Shannon's character for his "truthful" statements. Quite frankly, the movie makes the case that this IS mental illness (crudely treated with 37 electroshock treatments, but mental illness nonetheless) and he very likely should not have been unleashed on the Wheeler's by his mother, regardless of their hypocrisy and fakeness.
There is something strange, of course, about Kathy Bates, too. (Hey, she won HER Oscar for the madwoman Annie Wilkes in Misery.) If nothing else, the Wheelers are gracious about allowing Bates to bring her crazy son into their home to attack them, and she should have known how horrible he could be. When Leo is ready to beat Shannon up (but maybe the madman could have beaten LEO up), Bates rushes in and screams "he's sick!"
Then why inflict him on the Wheelers?
The movie chooses to give Bates and her milquetoast husband(shamed father of this horrible son) the final scene of the movie, and we learn that Bates "never really liked" the Wheelers and that they were "wrong for their house." The husband simply turns down his hearing aid and tunes the woman out. The End.
All of the above can be said to be "a good part about this movie," but I found it all rather a device. Bring this "crazy" character over to insult our protagonists and bring their marriage to a crucial (and tragic) climax.
Whether the "device" is good, or bad, is debateable. But I say this: Michael Shannon's character is no "hero" for telling the horrible truths he tells. He is violating the human contract of leaving other people alone to live their lives in private.