Director Bruce Beresford, still up from Down Under, continues to try to crash the society of Faulkner, Welty, O'Connor, and the rest, as a chronicler of the Deep South -- in this case, working again with Alfred Uhry, author of Beresford's Driving Miss Daisy, deep in South Carolina. The sound of a twanging girlish narrator at the opening is immediately unpromising, but she wisely keeps her own counsel till the final wrap-up after getting things rolling with: "One of us betrayed the rest, and set off a series of events worth telling." Well: not really so much a series of events, it turns out, as an accumulation of events. And not so much events as mere moments. And not all that worth telling, either. The betrayal alluded to is the unannounced departure of a wife and mother from a twenty-seven-year marriage ("Is it something feminist?" the daughter/narrator wants to know. "Or is it something real?"), and the rest of the family -- the husband/father and two daughters, one of them newly wed and pregnant and none too happy about it, the other on the verge of high-school commencement -- is left to pick up the pieces. Or to push aside the pieces. Or to pile on some more pieces. The people are for the most part companionable, or at any rate the actors are: Albert Finney, Suzy Amis, Kyle MacLachlan, Piper Laurie, Alfre Woodard, and newcomer Kathryn Erbe (a sort of next-generation Mare Winningham). But apart from the pleasures of the company, the movie has the feel of an idle-afternoon read (it's based on a novel by Josephine Humphreys), with a lot of skipped or scanned pages. Ethan Hawke, Jill Clayburgh. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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