Women's-issues forum on body image, sexuality, maternal instinct, career, the whole can of worms. Issues, it would be fair to say, in search of a movie, if not in search of characters. Brenda Blethyn is the middle-aged mother whose two biological daughters have flown the nest, though not as far or as soon as their father flew it, and who has attempted to fill that hole with an adopted black daughter (underline adopted, as this is not a reprise of Blethyn's role in Secrets and Lies), and who hopes to fill that other hole with, as it were, ten pounds of liposuction. In the meantime she fills her bed with throw pillows. The married one of her daughters, Catherine Keener (the indie queen whose forte is unsuppressed hostility), is an unmarketable craftsy artist, neglected by husband and daughter, who takes an eight-dollar-an-hour job in a one-hour photo shop and has a fling with her seventeen-year-old boss. The unmarried one, the stick-figured but twinkly-eyed Emily Mortimer, is a needy neurotic actress who drives away her boyfriend and takes in stray dogs (or merely unsupervised ones). Her, and the movie's, big scene: a part-by-part inspection of her naked body by an egocentric actor: "Your bush is big.... Your teeth are yellow...." The adopted daughter, Raven Goodwin, is on the other hand certifiably overweight and yearns for fair skin and straight hair. Writer-director Nicole Holofcener, whether out of brutal honesty or vindictive spite, certainly not out of effervescent wit, spares none of them: they are lucky, she suggests in a charitable conclusion, to have one another. And unlucky, the viewer might chime in, to have their writer-director. Dermot Mulroney, Jake Gyllenhaal, James Le Gros. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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