Life is cruel. That is the message in Todd Solondz’s latest drama Thinning. I’m not normally partial to movies that have built-in cry buttons. I’ve had it up to here (picture my hand by my neck) with Terms of Endearment rip-offs. I don’t want to have to see another AIDS victim deteriorate and I don’t want to see a soldier get maimed and/or killed. I hate being manipulated into crying whether it is a dramatic motion picture or a loved one’s funeral.

So it is surprising to me that Thinning – the story of a college graduate who discovers he has male pattern baldness – moved me to tears. I’m not talking about a glassy eye and a single teardrop. Not by a long shot. I had to use both sleeves of my sweater to wipe off the waterfall of emotion triggered by the heart-wrenching journey 24-year-old Sean Mullet embarks upon. It is a dark, dark world fueled by fluorescent lighting. And there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Mullet, played by an Oscar-worthy Ed Furlong, first discovers he is inflicted with the social life-threatening disease while trying on a pair of khaki chinos at the Gap. Although the pants look and feel good, a sudden glimpse in the changing room’s three-way mirror reveals an odd patch of skin that appears new and unfamiliar. Solondz did a great job directing the early scenes, ensuring that there were no shots of Mullet’s scalp up to that point. I was completely caught off guard, especially because his hair seemed thick and full-bodied from every other angle.

Unsure of what to make of it, Mullet runs his fingers through his hair and rubs the spot gently as though it were a wound. I don’t think there’s a lump big enough or a T-cell count low enough that could have prepared me for the depth of despair my heart reached when his finger circled around that spot of hairless flesh.

And that is just the first 15 minutes.

What follows is a harrowing tale of individual courage as a precocious Mullet searches high and low for an antidote for his hereditary misfortune. To see him find solace in a series of 800 numbers announced in radio advertisements is to see hope incarnate. But he soon learns that hope is as deciduous as an oak tree in autumn, and there is no cream, gel, pill, or electric shock that can stop the slow recession of follicles on his crown.

This knowledge does not tread lightly. As a deepening frontier of skin surfaces in the following years, Mullet’s relations with his girlfriend become estranged. When Mullet runs to Tammy (Tara Reid) on the beach after taking a dip in the ocean, she clearly seems puzzled by how much pink skin is exposed on his head. When she hugs him, Tammy rubs her fingers through his hair and finds that she has some souvenir locks in as much time. Tammy soon leaves him for a singer in an 80’s cover hair band. His friends, all of whom have a great set of hair, try to convince him that his hair is just in a slump and that it’ll grow back eventually. But Solondz’s clever use of mirrors indicates otherwise, causing Mullet to retreat from nightlife.

Furlong does an impressive job wrangling with the feelings of depression on screen. Although it is rare for a character to commit suicide 45 minutes into the film, I seriously believed that Mullet was going to jump off the his friend’s high rise balcony in a nerve-wracking moment that easily rivals the troubled drug-addicted Jenny in Zemckis’s touchstone picture Forrest Gump.

Instead, he braves onward – armed with a wallet-sized photo of Bruce Willis – and decides to stick it out through thick or thin. He bravely rejects the temptation of transplants even though he received a coupon in the mail that offered a free consultation.

Many of the lonely walks down dimly lit gray streets capture the same sense of emotional displacement exhibited in Sofia Coppola’s bitter romantic tale Lost In Translation. Unfortunately for Mullet, the language of hair loss is universal.

Other bright performances fill the screen throughout this three-hour epic drama. Kirsten Dunst does a wonderful job playing the girl who works at the café who is nice to Mullet and probably would totally go out with him if it weren’t for the fact that she has a boyfriend. And of course there is a classic performance from Johnny Depp as the idiosyncratic hair aerobics instructor. Mullet joins his class for a few months hopeful that Depp’s New Age hair exercises would do for him what they did for Depp. They don’t. It is learned later on in the film that Depp is a child molester.

In the end, Mullet runs into a barbershop right before closing time, grabs the shears from the barber’s hand, and shaves it all off himself. The barber gets really mad because he was in the middle of cutting a client’s hair and chases Mullet into the street. There is no denying that Thinning is a brutally candid discussion about the world’s biggest killer of young men’s esteem and will most likely be hailed as the movie that shifted the focus of the medicinal community away from the trivial concerns of such nominal maladies as Parkinson’s disease to the more warranted plague of male pattern baldness.

14/03/2007
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