The well-explored notion that something’s rotten beneath the neighborly pleasantries and manicured lawns of suburbia has proved to be a durable one, if properly tweaked, updated or, in the case of The Details, taken literally and inflated to absurd, Lynchian heights.
In the film’s opening minutes, moist, wriggling worms hang off rolls of sod being laid down in the backyard of the Langs, a couple in their 30s expecting their second child and just settling into their 10th year of marriage. Jeff (Tobey Maguire) is a friendly and generous obstetrician, in public a Stepford husband prone to using the word “skedaddle” while privately seeking any kind of release from his sexless and passive-aggressively discordant relationship with his wife, Nealy (Elizabeth Banks). When raccoons begin to tear up the sod night after night, Jeff obsessively vents his frustration by finding and killing the culprits.
But as Jeff reveals in the film’s prologue, the raccoons are only one of the factors in an impending and unlikely disaster. Poison, a potted plant, a kidney and a plate of cheese each play their own roles; in exploring how easily and strangely the life Jeff and Nealy have built together unravels, The Details lays out a series of mundane and dangerous objects as signposts — provocative keys to the film’s darkly comedic and tense puzzle.
After a bitter fight with Nealy, another night of raccoon havoc, and a stress-relieving email exchange with a woman he met online, Jeff looks to his psychotherapist friend Rebecca (Kerry Washington) to commiserate over drinks and maybe give him advice on infidelity — something she knows well from her own marital problems with her husband, Peter (Ray Liotta). It’s unclear what Jeff intends for the night; the earnest openness and positivity Maguire brought to Peter Parker he also applies to Jeff, but the actor also shades the character with enough awareness of his own aw-shucks affect that Jeff is sometimes tempted to manipulation, to deploy his honest face to a dark purpose. He sleeps with Rebecca but instantly regrets it; the next day he and his son surprise Nealy with breakfast in bed.