Jonathan Kasdan becomes the second son of Lawrence Kasdan, after Jake, to have followed his father into the director's chair. His feature debut is a relationship thing at about the Cameron Crowe level of wit and wisdom, although perhaps that name offers itself as a reference point because of the way in which every significant mood or moment is swept up, and along, by a pop song on the soundtrack. The "heartsick" hero -- a twenty-six-year-old Hollywood screenwriter (soft porn but bigger ambitions) who has just been dumped by his gamine girlfriend, an up-and-coming actress and Levi's model -- slinks out of L.A. and off to suburban Michigan to stay with his demented grandmother and to work on that long-brewing "personal" project about his high-school days. In nineteen movies out of twenty, he could be expected, there, to encounter a viable alternative or two, but even though he's surrounded by females, none is really viable as an alternative. Apart from his cranky, crotchety, foul-mouthed, bird-flipping, thoroughly stereotyped grandmother (Olympia Dukakis), the house across the street contains three other females, as well as the mostly absent man of the house. The mother, patently, is too old for him and has breast cancer (we can judge how serious the movie is from the fact that Meg Ryan shaves off her hair, or appears to have shaved off her hair, and throws up on the rug), and the angry Abstract Expressionist teenage daughter (Kristen Stewart) is much too young for him, and the precocious yoga-practicing French-speaking preteen daughter (Makenzie Vega) is still younger. His uncertain relationships with each of these, as confidant, advisor, whatever, are fairly absorbing in their development and evolvement; and the film is plainly aiming for the human, the real, the true, even if the whole thing has been fastidiously planed and sanded and varnished to glide along like a sailboat on a glassy lake. And Adam Brody, with his sleepy slurry manner of speech and slouchy burdened posture, makes a sympathetic and a likable hero. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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