'The Chumscrubber' (R) (out of four)

It seems perfectly appropriate that "The Chumscrubber," a scathing satire of suburban family life, makes its way into theaters just as the drama "Crash" is still making its way across the country.

In the latter, 13 Los Angeles adults from various backgrounds are brought together over the course of a single night and forced to confront issues of bigotry and intolerance. In "The Chumbscrubber," a similar common event is a suicide, and the reactions from this ensemble of characters could not be more different.

In an arid suburban development -- its location unknown -- dozens of families live in one home after another, peering out their window but rarely ever talking to those on the outside or, for that matter, on the inside. What writer Zac Stanford and director Arie Posin have envisioned is a world of open isolation, where cheerful chats are really vicious attacks and while this world's surface glistens with clean homes, perfect lawns, overflowing glasses of wine and shining cars, what lies beneath is not just poisoned but non-existent.

This is not the first film to take on the deceptive shallowness of suburbia and the generational divide that destroys both family and community. Since "The Ice Storm," the topic has been a favorite of directors who want to comment on the hypocrisy of a place that pretends to exist for the benefit of families, but really poisons the very people who take up residence in these cookie-cutter developments.

What Stanford and Posin have hit on, though, is a new twist in the formula. Here, kids are constantly given prescription drugs to help them find "balance," these kids then turn around and create a black market for prescription drugs at their schools, everyone seems distanced from the violence they practice, and the event that threatens this ideal suburban utopia is the suicide of Dean's (Jamie Bell) best friend.

In other movies, and likely in most corners of the rational world, a suicide would lead parents to talk to their kids, lead to communities rallying around a distraught mother and lead to its fare share of trauma among the victim's friends. But not in "The Chumscrubber." Here, the answers for the parents are to give their kids pills and ignore that despairing mother and her tragedy altogether, just as the lives and problems of these youth continue to spiral out of control.

In fact, the film's main story only comes about because this dead teenager had someone's stash of drugs, and they want it back. So they kidnap a child -- it turns out to be the wrong child, but no one much cares in this bleak world -- and demand that Dean go into his friend's house and get the goods.

The story exists on two levels, both hilarious and disturbing in the ways they can co-exist without ever bumping into each other. On one level is a surprisingly serious and dramatic story involving children, kidnappings, love and despair. On another is the world of the parents, where people are more concerned about their own cooking, careers and parties to ever notice that their child has gone missing or is grinding up drugs only feet away.

While jumping between these themes -- one comic, one tragic -- leads to some pacing issues, the world of the parents also doubles as comic relief for the far more sober depiction of teenage life. Just consider the scene where Dean approaches his mother, holding a beer. Her response: "Don't explain yourself to me. I trust you." She doesn't want to know about him, his life or his problems, but would rather sit in the back yard, sipping wine, pretending all is well. The climax of the film occurs in words, as someone finally stands up and demands that they not be ignored. Ignoring, after all, is what the adults in this world seem to do best.

The two most remarkable things about this film involve its filmmakers. For Arie Posin, "The Chumscrubber" stands as a remarkable first project. Ambitious not only in subject matter and scope (we follow over a dozen characters), the film cuts between a number of mediums, including sequences that resemble a video game. Posin successfully manages this three-ring circus with the energy of a filmmaker who is clearly passionate about the subject matter, intent on saying something about the way we live.

It's producer Bonnie Curtis, however, as a long-time Steven Spielberg collaborator, who perhaps deserves more recognition.

Not only assembling an all-star cast including Ralph Fiennes, Glenn Close, Carrie Anne-Moss and others who take this material and run with it, the film is also being released with a most unique distribution scheme. Rather than start on the coasts and work inland, it's going to start inland -- near the suburbs of the film's story -- and work out to the coasts. If successful, it could challenge the entire notion of mainstream film distribution in this country.

That is, if people can get over the title and their timidity in seeing a film that may take aim at their very communities. Behind it all, there's a fascinating story to be found about angry people living in a world that sees they're angry, hears they're angry, but seems unable to get past its prescription drugs and home-cooked casseroles to actually deal with the problem.