"The Pumpkin Eater "is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and t
he pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious
perch of a therapist's couch, and her smart, wry, confiding, immensely sympathe
tic voice immediately captures and holds our attention. She is the mother of a v
ast, swelling brood of children, also nameless, and the wife of a successful scr
eenwriter, Jake Armitage. The Armitages live in the city, but they are building
a great glass tower in the country in which to settle down and live happily ever
after. But could that dream be nothing more than a sentimental delusion? At the
edges of vision the spectral children come and go, while our heroine, alert to
the countless gradations of depression and the innumerable forms of betrayal, tr
ies to make sense of it all: doctors, husbands, movie stars, bodies, grocery lis
ts, nursery rhymes, messes, aging parents, memories, dreams, and breakdowns. How
to pull it all together? Perhaps you start by falling apart.
