Igby Goes Down

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Awards

BFCA 2003 - Won - Best Young Actor/Actress

Casting Soceity of America, USA 2003 - Nominated - Artios Best Casting for Feature Film, Drama

CDG Award 2003 - Nominated - Excellence in Costume Design for Film

Golden Globe 2003 - Nominated - Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture

BFCA 2003 - Won - Best Young Actor/Actress

Casting Soceity of America, USA 2003 - Nominated - Artios Best Casting for Feature Film, Drama

CDG Award 2003 - Nominated - Excellence in Costume Design for Film

Golden Globe 2003 - Nominated - Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture

Golden Globe 2003 - Nominated - Best Performance by an Actoress in a Motion Picture

Independent Spirit Award 2003 - Nominated - Best First Screenplay

Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards 2003 - Won - Sierra Award - Best Screenplay

Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards 2003 - Won - Sierra Award - Best Supporting Actress

Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards 2003 - Won - Sierra Award - Youth in Film

Montreal World Film Festival 2002 - Nominated - Grand Prix des Ameriques

MTV Movie Awards 2002 - Nominated - Breakthrough Male Performance

OFCS 2003 - Nominated - Best Breakthrough Filmmaker

Satellite Awards 2003 - Nominated - Best Motion Picture Comedy or Musical

Satellite Awards 2003 - Nominated - Best Screenplay, Original

Satellite Awards 2003 - Won - Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musi

US Comedy Arts Festival 2003 - Won - Comedy Film Honor Best First Time Directro

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Igby Goes Down

Director:
Burr Steers
R, 97 Minutes
 

At A Glance

Film Synopsis

Igby Slocumb (Kieran Culkin), a rebellious and sarcastic seventeen-year-old boy, is at war with the stifling world of "old money" privilege he was born in to. With a schizophrenic father (Bill Pullman), a self-absorbed, distant mother (Susan Sarandon), and a shark-like young republican big brother (Ryan Phillippe), Igby figures there must be a better life out there - and sets about finding it. Happily flunking out of yet another prep school, Igby is sent off to a military academy in the dreaded Midwest. With the aid of his mother's pilfered credit card, he goes on the lam. His darkly comedic voyage eventually lands him in New York, where he hides out at his godfather's (Jeff Goldblum) weekend pied-a-terre. There he encounters a deviant cast of characters, including his godfather's trophy choreographer girlfriend (Amanda Peet) and the terminally bored Sookie Sapperstein (Claire Danes). In his quest to free himself from the oppressive dysfunction of his family, Igby's struggles veer from the comic to the tragic in an ultimately noble attempt to keep himself from "going down."

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Our Take

"In what many call a modern day adaptation of Catcher In the Rye, Kieran Culkin stars opposite an all-star cast as he fights against his bourgeois surroundings, his manic parents, a tormented upbringing, and the world itself."

Others Who Liked the Film

 

Details

MPAA:
Rated R for languagge, sexuality and drug content.

Runtime:
97 min.

Country:
UNITED STATES

Language:
English/American

Color:
Color

Certification:
R

Tagline

Insanity is relative

 

Memorable Quotes

Igby: I'm drowning in assholes. Sookie: What kind of name is 'Igby'? Igby: The kind of name that someone named 'Sookie' is in no position to question. Igby: Good things come to obsessive-compulsives who fixate. D.H. Banes: I believe, umm, that certain people in life are meant to fall by the wayside; to serve as warnings to the rest of us; signs posts along the way. Igby: To where? D.H. Banes: Success. Oliver: Our father would be a 'slippery when schizophrenic' sign, for instance... [pause] Oliver: ... along the highway of life. Igby: She's a dancer who doesn't dance and her friend is a painter who doesn't paint. It's kind of a Boho version of the Island of the Lost Toys. Igby: Oliver is majoring in neo-fascism at Colombia. Oliver: Economics. Igby: Semantics. Igby: How many Vassar professors and intellectual theologians beget nymphomaniacal, pseudo-Bohemian JAPs? Sookie: I am not a JAP. Russell: Anne Frank. Anne Frank. The soldiers are gone. Come out and play. Igby: Instead of saying someone or something is funny, why don't you just laugh? Sookie: [laughs] Is that better? Igby: Much. [talking about Oliver] Russell: He left you a ticket. Igby: Excellent. Russell: It's nonrefundable. He wanted me to tell you that. Igby: Dick. Igby: It's ironic that the first time in my life that I feel remotely affectionate for her, is when she's dead. Oliver: You beat up her corpse. Igby: I know, but after that. Oliver: [on Igby] I think if Gandhi had to spend a prolonged amount of time with you, he'd end up beating the shit out of you, too. Sookie: You call your mother "Mimi"? Igby: "Heinous One" is a bit cumbersome. [Sookie nods] Igby: And Medea was taken. D.H. Banes: Mimi. GET OFF THE MAID. [to the priest] Igby: If heaven is such a wonderful place then how come being crucified is such a big fucking sacrifice? Rachel: How you doin'? Igby: Good. D.H. Banes: Igby, Igby... how you doin'? Well. You're doing "well". How's the work coming along there, stud? Igby: Uh... well? Bunny: Igby, I could just eat you with a spoon. Igby: Don't. Sookie: You have a huge crush on me, don't you? Igby: Fuck off. Sookie: Why aren't you in school now? Igby: Sheer ingenuity. Sookie: You're funny. Sookie: You know what I think when I'm this close to another body? I think one day at one moment... this body that I'm holding in my arms will stop breathing... stop living. Just... stop. One day you'll happen upon my name in the obits and you'll remember this moment when we were so close. Igby: You're a real fuckin' upper. Sookie: He's your brother, you act like you hate him. Igby: I do. I do hate him. He's totally hateable. Evil niblet fuck. Sookie: How's your brother doing these days? Igby: I don't have a brother, I'm an only child. Sookie: Oliver was your brother I thought. Igby: He is, and yet... Sookie: And yet what? Igby: Well I was about to say that we were both raised only children, but that sounds like something you would say. Sookie: That's funny. Rachel: So are you two in school or something? Oliver: I'm at Columbia and as far as this year's challenge for Igby, we're still waiting to hear back from this fun parochial school in D.C. Igby: "Perchance to dream." Oliver: He's already done the Protestant circuit. Mom must have some compromising photos of the head priest with an altar boy for them to even be considering Igby. Igby: I love the fact that the captain of the morality team invites his chick to the same party as his wife, who let's face it, isn't the sharpest tool in the shed anymore. And what's more, none of their supposed mutual friends protects her. None of them bats a fucking eyelash at his hypocrisy. I love that, I really do. Embrace your moral hypocrisy, D.H., go for it. Russell: I told her; Lorna Luft was just too fucking obscure. People just think you're doing a bad Liza. Igby: [on Ollie] He was ten-speeding a gazillion miles per hour through Central Park. You know, racing with all the other young Turks. When, all of a sudden he caught a glimpse of himself in the handlebar mirror and became so... aroused by it that he burst his Speedo shorts which then got caught in the gears and threw him right on his face. Splatter. Mimi: I take it you know that D.H. is your father? Igby: No. Mimi: Then I'm really glad I told you. Igby: Russell. I need a job. Sookie: Dimebag... well that got your attention. Igby: Pavlov's pothead... I hear the sound of a bong clink and my eyes begin to water. Sookie: That's funny. [Igby returns from military school] Igby: Turtle. He was my best buddy. Then his rifle backfired and blew his face off. We all learned a valuable lesson about weapon maintenance that day. Mimi: Why didn't the school inform me? Igby: It wasn't the school's fault. They were great about it, paid for the dry cleaning and everything. Not because they had to, but because it was the right thing to do. Jason Slocumb: You see it, Igby? I feel this great, great pressure coming down on me. It's constantly coming down on me. It's crushing me. Igby: [to Ollie about their mother] You killed her. You can bury her. Sookie: You're a furious boy. I mean eventually you won't be a boy and it'll eat you up. Igby: 'Furious boy'? The thought that I'm going to live my life without ever having told her to fuck off, is pretty goddamn infuriating. Igby: You know just because you're dying, I'm not going to apologize. Not for anything that I've ever done. Sookie: Do you hate my guts? Igby: For like a month I did. Now you're not even in my top five. Igby: I'm going to California. I need a fucking sunny day. Igby: Fuckwit. Oliver: So we started calling him Igby whenever he lied. And he lied a lot. Igby: I'm scared. Igby: Can we go back to your mom's apartment and have sex? Sookie: No! You think that'll make you feel better? It won't. It'll just make you feel really empty and sad. You're better off masturbating. Igby: Are you a vegetarian? Sookie: Why would you ask that? Igby: I've just never seen anybody roll a joint like that. Sookie: What does that have to do with being a vegetarian? Igby: Oh, they're just so precious. Sookie: I roll perfect joints. Igby: I'm not putting them down, they're incredible. Sookie: Well, thank you. Igby: It's incredible that a human being can make such neat, little joints. Sookie: You make it sound as if I'm anal or something, just because I know how to roll a perfect joint. Igby: No, not anal. Vegetarian. Sookie: Well, what does that mean? Igby: Well, you don't roll like, big rasta spliff joints, do you? Your joints are like salad joints, not like a big, sloppy, bleeding cheeseburger-that-you-rip-into-kind-of-a-joint joint. Sookie: I guess marijuana isn't a visceral experience for me. Sex is for me. Igby: Right. Sookie: Ok, so I am a vegetarian, but for purely moral reasons. Peeka: Lucky Charms? Igby: What? Peeka: Fucking Lucky Charms! Igby: I don't know. Sookie: [to and about Ollie] You're the fascist brother. Igby: He prefers young Republican. Igby: I know a girl from Baltimore. Igby: Listen, I've got this discount fare and it'd be kinda hypocritical of me, ya know, you'll handle it like everything else right? Oliver: Right Igby: You should hate me Oliver: I don't Igby: You should Oliver: I don't hate you, don't be indulgent Igby: Never that Oliver: You're going to California? Igby: Yup, the sunshine state. Oliver: Actually, Florida is the sunshine state. Igby: Really, well 3000 miles from fucking here. Oliver: Is there a number where we can reach you? Igby: We? No. Oliver: Well you call when there is, There really isn't that much between us is there? Igby: Just an ever diminishing amount of blood. Mimi: [to Oliver, about Igby] His conception was an act of animosity, why shouldn't his life be one as well? Hockey Player: My ball, cunt-face! Igby: You think you're what he wants? You think you fit the picture of how he wants his life to look? You think he would bring you back to our mother as a potential wife? Our mother? Sure she'd be nice to your face, but then the first opportunity, she'd pull him aside and warn him off. "Mongrel children have such a hard time fitting in dearest." He will lie to you. He will lie to you! He will use you up and marry some inbred Darien Frau who will beget him all the towheaded brats he can afford. They are rigid and they are cold! And you don't know! They are cold, cold, cold to the fucking bone! Igby: That tortures me. Igby: [to Sookie] Are those cloves? Outstanding!

 

 

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