A sardonic soap-opera star, having been sideswiped by a New York cab and confined for life to a wheelchair, retires alone to her backwater Louisiana family estate ("I'm not the Wheelchair Olympics type"), where she goes through innumerable bottles of white wine and a fair number of private nurses (thumbnail caricature sketches), before she finds one who can give as good as she gets: "Did they tell you I was a bitch?" "On wheels!" Alfre Woodard, with those bulging and marvelously expressive orbs (now seemingly suppressing astonishment, now seemingly fighting tears), is very endearing as the nurse, making full use of the poky and meandering development to shade in every nuance from initial wariness to eventual warmth. And Mary McDonnell, or her diehard apologists, can explain away some of her actressiness with the excuse that she is after all playing an actress. The fun at the expense of soap operas, though, is too facile and follow-the-crowd to be much actual fun: we do not need to be reminded so repeatedly that writer-director John Sayles aims higher than daytime TV, somewhere in the neighborhood of a women's-magazine novella. Nor do we need to be made so acutely aware that he generally lands somewhere in between. He engineers a gag-line or a comic monologue (witness the "I didn't ask for the anal probe" recitation) with all the calculation and contrivance of a sitcom writer; and the elucidation of the movie's title plunges us in the direction of, if again not all the way to, the murky poeticism of Salinger's bananafish. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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