Jill Hennessy is a few minutes late for her phone interview.
She’s busy tuning her guitar in preparation for afternoon performances
on MTV Canada and E-Talk. The earthy-voiced actor—best known
for her television roles as straight-shooting A.D.A. Claire Kincaid on
the original Law & Order, and as the emotionally messed-up
medical examiner Dr. Jordan Cavanaugh on Crossing Jordan—is
releasing an album of “alternative folk rock” in June.
Hennessy isn’t in Toronto promoting her music though. She’s joining
filmmaker Steven Martini to discuss their new film, Lymelife, in
which Hennessy stars, along with a super-strong cast that includes Alec
Baldwin, Kieran and Rory Culkin, Timothy Hutton, Cynthia Nixon and Emma
Roberts. The family drama, executive produced by Martin Scorcese, was
co-written and directed by Martini and his brother, Derrick, who became
a dad for the first time the night before the interview.
A strongly autobiographical film (like a gentler The Squid and
the Whale or The Ice Storm) set in mid-1970s Long Island,
Lymelife employs an unlikely catalyst—Lyme disease, which is
transmitted from deer tick bites—to slowly and painfully unravel the
lives of two families. “When I was a kid, my girlfriend, Adriana, her
father had Lyme disease,” says Martini. “It’s based off of that first
love experience that destroys you. We did our research on Lyme disease,
and during the period it was still mysterious and unknown. We thought
that was more apropos to the story we were telling.”
Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin) is in love with his childhood friend,
Adrianna Bragg (Roberts), whose father Charlie (Hutton) has contracted
Lyme disease, which besides a range of physical affects, can also cause
cognitive disturbances. The outbreak fuels worry in Scott’s mother
Brenda (Hennessy), who insists on duct-taping every opening of his
clothing shut. Meanwhile, Adrianna’s mother (Nixon) is hired by Scott’s
father Mickey (Baldwin) to work at his real estate company, selling the
dream of suburban life in a new subdivision. Tension is high,
especially after the arrival of Scott’s brother Jimmy (Kieran Culkin),
home from the army.
Because of the film’s connections to the Martini brothers’ own lives
and stories—their parents also moved from Queens to Long Island
during the height of the mid-1970s suburban sprawl—discussing the
film with their folks was a tough proposition. “For a while we didn’t
want them to know what we were doing,” says Martini. “We thought, ‘Oh
Jesus Christ, they’re going to see this and be utterly embarrassed,’
but eventually they realized that we were making something out of
something we thought was a failure in our family; that we made
something that was constructive and creative and ultimately, they’re
really happy we were able to do that and proud that they had a hand in
our growth of artistic expression as storytellers.”
Although Lymelife is definitely a dude-focused
movie—written by two brothers, starring two brothers—Hennessy
appreciates that the female characters actually have purpose and
stories of their own, which is not always the case in film-land. “I
found it so well drawn, man,” she says. “So often female
characters—girlfriend characters, mothers—are peripheral characters
that in some way are totally ineffective with regards to the plot and
pushing things along. This was the opposite. I love this character.
Where she begins, where she ends. Her range of passion and fear. Emma
Roberts, Cynthia Nixon—all these characters go through these huge
turns. It’s nice to see an ensemble where the characters that are
written into the script are so fleshed out, are so poignant and moving,
and disturbing.”
Although Hennessy and her twin sister Jacqueline, a Canadian
journalist who once appeared with Jill in the Cronenberg twin horror
Dead Ringers, would tease and fight, “we would never get down
and dirty like these guys. But boy, other than that, there’s not much
of a difference.” It was this universality that attracted her to
Lymelife: “Every family has things they don’t want necessarily
to confront and things that do want to come out that tend to be ugly.
That’s what I loved about this—it was so bloody uncomfortable. Wow,
they really captured the elements that can make up the experience of a
child in a family.”
Lymelife opens Friday, May 8.
This article appears in May 7-13, 2009.