Writer-director Jane Anderson's adaptation of the memoir by Terry Ryan (the book's subtitle: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less), a valentine to a dutiful, long-suffering Fifties-era Catholic housewife who supplemented the family's meager income through the practice of "contesting," writing ad slogans and jingles for prizes: "Dad, do you believe it?" Mother exclaims over her new washer and dryer. "No more boiling diapers on top of the stove!" (The end of an era comes in the early Sixties, with the advent of the no-skill sweepstakes: "It's the death of literacy!") Given that the man of the family is a raging, cursing, money-squandering drunk, clumsily played by Woody Harrelson in a bad toupee, the overall chipper mood seems a bit oblivious; and Julianne Moore, in a broader portrait of a Fifties slave than in The Hours and Far from Heaven, seems almost demented, almost Stepford Wifely. But of course that's precisely, or approximately, the point. The movie does have heart, and it wears it on its sleeve in the touching coda that rounds up the real Ryan children today, and allows the "deceased" mother to kiss her authorial daughter on the cheek. With Laura Dern, Ellary Porterfield, Trevor Morgan. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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