How well do each of the kids break away from their parents' emotional lives and find their own?

Malee stages her own obsessive dramas of keeping dad's interest, making Gus play the absent dad. She basically lucked out that Gus was a good guy, as most heterosexual dudes who had gong along with her seduction drama would have nailed her to the wall. But SHE FIGHTS IT OUT WITH HER MOTHER, to get the right to visit her dad. Go Malee.

There's nothing that pleases me like seeing a boy in knock-down drag-out physical struggle against his mother's emotional life, and Cuesta gives me this with his roly-poly. (My buddy in the cubscout days was a roly-poly just like that.) And BY GOD, we do see that family eating salad at the end!!!!

But as for Rudy, I am profondly disturbed by his FAILURE to find his way to a morality that goes beyond his mother's nasty little revenge fantasy.
Lord knows his dad's genderfucked housecleaning spree is not a road he is going to go down. I wanted, and wanted very badly, to the good-boy bad-boy alliance, so painfully formed, succeed.

The "boy without a face who goes around with a mask" schtick, of course, is straight from Mel Gibson's "Man without a face."

(Dad in an apron, and that image disturbing to a boy looking to find his emotional independence, is straight from REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE.)

---Didaskalos

Now, in the movie, Youth?? will be played by a young Corey Haim...