BEFORE: Roger Rees carries over from "The Emperor's Club" and brings me to my final Father's Day film, I think. OK, so he only has small cameos in both films, that still counts. For a good while I've been watching an actor have a tiny role in one film, then a huge role in the next, and that makes me feel good for some reason. It's liked I picked one person in the cast of a large film to really shine in the next one. But it hardly matters, an appearance is an appearance.
Now I can start focusing on the road to July 4 in about 2 1/2 weeks, and then the start of the big Summer Rock Concert chain in just about a month.
THE PLOT: Two sisters return home to deal with their ailing father, only to face some surprising situations.
AFTER: This is a very strange film, and I didn't really crack the code until the next day, when I saw that Roy Lichtenstein image on the poster. More on that later.
This fits right in with my other featured Father's Day films this year - "Winter Passing", "Kodachrome", "Fences", and "Wish I Was Here". In all of these films, the family patriarch is sick or dying, or maybe just not mentally all there any more. Sorry to be a bummer on this subject, especially when my own father's health seems to be doing fine, but I don't write these films, I only program and watch them. This one was picked to go with "Wish I Was Here" on a DVD, because it seemed to be on a very similar subject - but it probably has more in common with "Winter Passing", where a daughter returns home to a father who's developed strange habits and is acting irrationally due to some mixture of senility and grief for a dead spouse.
But there are so many things in this film that just don't seem to connect with everything else - why does the father's girlfriend pretend to be a nurse, while coming to his house to sleep with him at very strange times of day? Who is she really, and what is she after? The sisters argue over everything, like how best to care for their father, and what exactly was the relationship between their father and their deceased mother. (Turns out the sisters see this very differently, one was kept in blissful ignorance, probably because she's the younger sister.) They can't even agree about whether to dig for their father's "buried treasure" in the backyard, or if it even exists.
Meanwhile, one sister apparently has a husband who prefers the company of men, so they have something of an open marriage, while the other one is married to the son of a famous artist, who's well-off financially but filled with fears and neuroses. The scenes with this character were wildly inconsistent too, like when he and his wife were outside the art gallery it felt like they were meeting each other for the first time, like the wife didn't know her own husband's family history, which was very odd. I should probably have watched that scene again once I figured out that the two characters were married.
But again, nothing really adds up here. Like, is the sister married to the artist rich or poor? She tries to act rich, and they make a big deal about how much she paid for that pair of boots, but then why is her father living in squalor? (Or is that just the way Pittsburgh looks? I'm not sure.) Why do we never see the son of the construction worker without a hood covering his face, for a long while? I was honestly starting to wonder if they were short on actors, and one guy had to play two roles but keep his face covered in the second role.
This film is so under-the-radar that Wikipedia doesn't even properly describe the plot, or list the entire cast, which is strange. But I think that movie poster proved very insightful, because it features a famous image from Roy Lichtenstein, and the director of this film is named Mitchell Lichtenstein. Yup, he's the son of the famous artist, and there's a character in the film who's also the son of a famous artist. So perhaps much of this film is autobiographical, and this could explain why the situations are so specific, and don't really add up to a coherent plot, because they really happened and weren't just constructed by a Hollywood screenwriter, who would have tied everything together better. This makes some sense, and answers some questions, but it also leads to a few more.
Like "Wish I Was Here", this film also has some fantasy-like sequences that take place in the imagination of one of the characters, but these also don't add up to much either. We see a flashback to the two sisters visiting their dying mother in the hospital, and as they touch the pendant on her necklace, it begins to emit a glow that grows brighter and brighter, until her whole body seems to be emitting light. OK, that's fine, but what does this metaphor mean, in the grander scheme of things? It's really obtuse, and that's the most coherent of the dream sequences.
Also starring Parker Posey (last seen in "Irrational Man"), Demi Moore (last seen in "Mr. Brooks"), Rip Torn (last seen in "The Cincinnati Kid"), Ellen Barkin (last seen in "Up in Smoke"), Christian Camargo (last seen in "K-19: The Widowmaker"), Victor Slezak (last seen in "Bride Wars"), Billy Magnussen (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Celia Weston (last seen in "Junebug"), Tom McNutt, Sebastian Roché, Patti D'Arbanville, David L. King, Susan Blommaert, with archive footage of Boris Karloff (last seen in "House of Frankenstein").
RATING: 4 out of 10 adult diapers
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