The Safety of Objects

Directed by Rose Troche

15

25 July 2002 2h 1m Box Office: US$453KDrama

6.549%65%6.4

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A series of overlapping stories about four suburban families dealing with different maladies. Esther Gold's life is consumed by caring for her comatose son; Jim Train is sent into a tailspin when he's passed over for a promotion; Annette Jennings' family is struggling in the wake of her divorce; Helen Christianson is determined to shake up her mundane life.

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Cast of The Safety of Objects

Glenn CloseEsther Gold
Dermot MulroneyJim Train
Jessica CampbellJulie Gold
Patricia ClarksonAnnette Jennings
Joshua JacksonPaul Gold
Moira KellySusan Train
Robert KleinHoward Gold
Timothy OlyphantRandy
Mary Kay PlaceHelen Christianson
Kristen StewartSam Jennings
Alex HouseJake Train
Charlotte ArnoldSally Christianson
Andrew AirlieBruce Jennings
Stephanie MillsKaren
Angela VintTina
Aaron AshmoreBobby Christianson
C. David JohnsonWayne Christianson
Haylee WanstallRayanne Jennings
Carly ChalomEmily Train
Guinevere TurnerTani (voice)
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The Safety of Objects Ratings & Reviews

CrossCutCritic30 April 2025
What’s Left After the Beautiful Things Break --- It’s the kind of neighborhood that looks like a memory. Trim hedges. Playgrounds. SUVs. A trampoline in every other backyard. Children’s drawings on the fridge. Half-finished remodels. Marriages built on schedules and softly decaying vows. A soundtrack of grocery lists, quiet panic, and silent longing. The Safety of Objects doesn’t mock these places. It mourns them. It’s a film made of quiet collisions — of people who are supposed to be fine. But they’re not. And that’s the point. --- The film weaves together the lives of several suburban families: A mother (Glenn Close) devoted to her son, who lies in a coma. A lawyer (Dermot Mulroney) chasing youth through an affair. A woman (Patricia Clarkson) clinging to consumer routines while her marriage bleeds out. A teenage boy (Joshua Jackson) testing the edges of emotional survival. No one is villainous. Everyone is fragile. There’s no explosive tragedy. Just the slow corrosion of connection — the ache that comes when life doesn’t fall apart suddenly, but quietly slips out the side door when no one’s watching. --- What Troche captures — and what A.M. Homes’s stories already knew — is that grief doesn’t always look like mourning. Sometimes it looks like shopping. Sometimes it looks like moving on too fast. Sometimes it looks like talking to a dollhouse like it’s a lover. Sometimes it’s a brother shaving his legs because he can’t admit he misses his sister. It’s all absurd. And true. And terribly familiar. --- There’s an Augustinian thread running through it, even if unnamed. That strange truth he once wrote: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” Here, every character is restless. They reach for affairs, consumer goods, drugs, lawsuits, distractions. But nothing holds. The objects aren’t safe anymore. They were never meant to be. --- There’s a scene with Glenn Close — no spoilers — where you realize she hasn’t just lost her son to a coma. She’s losing herself. Not dramatically. But incrementally, with every morning that the world continues without him. She tries to fix it. By holding. By letting go. By bargaining. By remembering too much and not enough. It doesn’t work. But something else starts to happen in the margins: not victory, not healing exactly, but… surrender. And in that surrender, the faint breath of grace. --- The theology here is cruciform, though the cross is never named. It’s in the unchosen suffering. In the love that clings even after meaning dissolves. In the truth that no amount of perfection, performance, or purchase can fill the absence where someone once was. The God in The Safety of Objects is not the God of the mega-church or the miracle ending. He is the God who hides in hospital rooms. The God who waits in the silence between mothers and sons. The God who knows what it’s like to be discarded, like an object, and who still whispers love anyway. --- By the end, nothing has been solved. But something has changed. The ache is still there. But it’s been named. And what is named can be carried. Not fixed. Carried. --- The Safety of Objects isn’t for everyone. But for those who know the grief of things not lost but quietly broken — the grief of homes that look whole from the street — it is a mirror. And maybe, if you lean in, it’s also a crack in the mirror where the light comes through.

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