Page 2 of 3
Moviegoers can take or leave the message beneath the mayhem, but what's on the surface for everyone to enjoy is an expertly crafted terror tale that's heavy on the jolts and morally complicated when it comes to several of its characters -- for instance, a family man portrayed by Robert Carlyle is quickly revealed to be a less-than-exemplary role model for his kids (promising performers burdened with the unfortunate names Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton). And given the film's final shot, 28 Months Later isn't out of the question -- let's just hope it doesn't bring down what's been a bloody good show so far.
THE LEGENDARY Katharine Hepburn was occasionally too brittle for my taste, but watching Georgia Rule, it's hard to picture anyone else in the role of Georgia, a family matriarch who runs her household the way a drill instructor lords over greenhorn recruits. It would have been a tailor-made role for Hepburn 30 years ago, since she would have brought to the part the necessary balance of outward rigidity and inward serenity. Instead, it's Jane Fonda who now awkwardly fills the role, and, on the heels of her disastrous return to the screen in Monster-In-Law, it's clear that the career resuscitation isn't going exactly as planned.
Fonda's Georgia is a one-note shrew, and one of this schizophrenic movie's greatest failings is that it never acknowledges that it's this woman's puritanical behavior which started the chain reaction partly leading to the miserable circumstances that plague her daughter Lilly (Felicity Huffman) and her granddaughter Rachel (Lindsay Lohan).
Then again, it's not just Fonda's fault that Georgia is a poorly realized character; blame also must be directed at scripter Mark Andrus and director Garry Marshall. Marshall in particular has no clue how to orchestrate the movie's heavy themes involving alcoholism (Lilly), nymphomania (Rachel) and possible child abuse (Rachel claims she was repeatedly molested by her stepdad when she was 12); after all, he's the director who viewed mental retardation as little more than an amusing character quirk in The Other Sister. Here, he tries to lighten the movie's mood by having Rachel give a blowjob to a nice Mormon boy who's seriously trying to serve God (har har) and then painting the lad's girlfriend and her pals as the story's heavies.
Worthy mother-daughter sagas stretch all the way back to Stella Dallas in the 1930s and reached their zenith with 1983's magnificent Terms of Endearment. Georgia Rule harbored the seeds of a comparable tearjerker, but because it's been placed in the wrong hands, it fails to elicit much in the way of genuine emotion. If there's not a dry eye in the house when Lilly and Rachel finally hug, it's only because audiences will have cleared out by that point.
I HAVE NO IDEA how he takes his coffee, but when it comes to comedy, Danny DeVito takes it black -- as evidenced by the string of dark satires he's helmed over the course of two decades. In his hands, one can only speculate how far The Ex would have taken its dark comic undercurrents, but in the mitts of director Jesse Peretz and novice screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman, it doesn't take them quite far enough.
Still, The Ex offers enough in the way of laughs to earn it some measure of approval. Zach Braff plays Tom Reilly, who, along with his wife Sofia (Amanda Peet) and their newborn son, leaves NYC for Smalltown, Ohio, to work for his father-in-law (welcome back, Charles Grodin, after a 13-year retirement). The trouble starts immediately when Tom is paired at the office with Chip Sanders (Jason Bateman), a paraplegic who once had sex with Sofia during their school days and still carries the torch for her. Hoping to win her back -- and taking an instant dislike to her husband -- Chip sabotages Tom at every turn, embarrassing him in front of coworkers and alienating him from his family. It's a losing battle for Tom, not only given Chip's friendliness to everyone else but also because his wheelchair confinement only serves to make Tom's open hostility seem even more boorish.
The material is too often played for broad laughs that fail to achieve their purpose, but there's some nasty pleasure to be had in watching the escalating feud between Tom and Chip. It's just a shame the movie cops out by pulling its punch toward the end. By displaying a little more nerve, the filmmakers could have had a vicious pit bull of a comedy, on the order of Kingpin or DeVito's The War of the Roses. But by neutering themselves, they've delivered a comedy whose bark is ultimately worse than its bite.
IRIS WOULD HAVE seemed to be the first and last word on movies dealing with Alzheimer's disease, yet here comes Away From Her to provide it with troubled company.
OFFSIDE
***1/2
DIRECTED BY Jafar Panahi
STARS Sima Mobarak Shahi, Safar Samandar
28 WEEKS LATER
***
DIRECTED BY Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
STARS Robert Carlyle, Catherine McCormack
GEORGIA RULE
*1/2
DIRECTED BY Garry Marshall
STARS Jane Fonda, Lindsay Lohan
THE EX
**1/2
DIRECTED BY Jesse Peretz
STARS Zach Braff, Amanda Peet
AWAY FROM HER
***1/2
DIRECTED BY Sarah Polley
STARS Julie Chistie, Gordon Pinsent
Mobile
