? The title is something a parent says to a small child, and the divorcée played by Diane Keaton can’t seem to remember her three daughters are all grown up, especially the youngest, single one (Mandy Moore). Worried about her taste in men, Mom places a personal ad so she can secretly select a future son-in-law. Inadvertently, she winds up with one more candidate than needed.
+ The rival suitors (Tom Everett Scott, Gabriel Macht) are differentiated well. The way this plotline plays out, though predictable, is more intelligent than anything else in the movie. The daughters (Moore, Piper Perabo, and Lauren Graham) are all pleasant and frequently rise above the material.
- Oh, but what pedestrian material. Herein, a sample: The daughters have a big fight with Mom over her controlling behavior. They somehow know that this will make Mom get laryngitis, and that Mom won’t be able to stay alone, and so they play a three-way rock-paper-scissors to see who gets stuck with her. Mom comes in on the end of this, so they tell her they’d all wanted her to visit. Even though they’ve all just had a teary blow-up, Mom suddenly becomes so brain-dead that she seems to accept it. There are many scenes that feel similarly fake. Keaton is both a klutz and a victim of others’ klutziness. Thus not just one, but multiple scenes in which someone runs into her and she gets cake on her face, sure to provoke gales of laughter in any six-year old, which I’m pretty sure isn’t the target audience. The other stream of attempted humor relies on the oldest sister (Graham) being a lousy therapist who blithely breaches patient confidentiality, among other things. I’m pretty sure I was supposed to be laughing at her patient’s worries about his blood-sugar level rather than thinking she needed a new line of work. More problematic is the mother. The idea is that she’s micromanaging her daughter’s life because she’s unhappy about her own. Fair enough, but between Keaton’s histrionic performance and the sitcom-style writing, she just plain annoyed the crap out of me for most of the movie. The conventions of the plot require her to couple up, but her generally unconvincing hookup belies the premise that, for reasons we never learn, she’s been clammed up since her marriage ended.
= **1/2 If you like the premise (mother places personal ad for daughter), there’s a perfectly good movie called Next Stop Wonderland starring Hope Davis that came out in 1998. Better to rent that than watch this corny mess.
IMDB link
reviewed 2/8/07
No comments:
Post a Comment