Parents neglect and abuse
And that is what drove them to suicide
shareThe movie really doesn't set it up that they're abused at all. I mean, they across as very strict but well meaning parents. I'm also reading the book right now and I have yet to come across abuse here either. At most, the author writes about an unkept house (so far that I've read). The girls never come off as depressed or upset (aside from Cecilia). It truly leaves you wondering why the f,,k they took their lives.
shareI feel like imprisoning teenagers in their home is a form of abuse.
shareAlso the mother kind of tortured Lux when she made her burn her vinyl records. The parents kept their kids imprisoned for more than two weeks. All alone, without any social contacts. And in the end of the movie the mother says "I never understood why they did this". If I were the journalist who asked her I would have slapped her :P
shareIf you finish the book, you will realize why they took their lives. The film doesn't make it clear at all.
Hint, Trip abandoning Lux on the 50-yard line after deflowering her has everything to do with the suicides.
With all due respect, if you read the book, one soon realizes that they too are placed in the position of nostalgic men, who were once a part of a clique of boys who obsessed over the Lisbon sisters, and dreamed of rescuing them from their plight.
You too are left with holes, gaps, incomplete pieces...
The story is not about the suicides, per se; It is about their obsession with understanding something for which there will never be a satisfactory answer.
Maybe the word "obsession" is wrong. It really is a weight. It's the weight of wondering if they could have stopped them from killing themselves, and the weight of never really knowing why the girls couldn't stick things out long enough to escape their oppressive household (Therese was almost an adult by then), and chose to follow Cecilia instead.
If Lux losing her virginity on a football field and subsequently causing her and her sisters to be locked away from the world is reason enough, then there's still pieces missing. It's not enough.
That's why the boys keep combing over "the evidence", trying to make sense of it all...and why the audience/reader does the same.
That's the brilliance of this book, and why I feel it was so well adapted in the film.