Splashy feature debut for the man behind the cable-television series Nip/Tuck, writer-director Ryan Murphy, a hey-look-at-me cannonball, adapted from the "memoir" of Augusten Burroughs. Set in the Seventies, it spans his prepubescence ("I guess it doesn't matter where I begin," the narrator comments in voice-over, "because nobody's going to believe me anyway") into his gloomily gay adolescence. In specific, the breakup of his nuclear family -- an alcoholic academic father and a psychobabbling self-deluding poet manqué mother ("Augusten, your mother was meant to be a very famous woman") -- and his subsequent placement in the foster care of the mother's crackpot analyst, whose first arrival on the scene parodies the arrival of Max von Sydow in The Exorcist. (True to the period, for sure.) The boy's second home is no stabler, a pink-painted monstrosity that accommodates a haggard hausfrau who never misses a day of Dark Shadows and snacks on dog kibble; two nubile daughters, one coquettishly virginal and one candidly tarty; a cat named Freud; a perennial Christmas tree in the parlor; a never-diminishing pile of dishes in the kitchen; the doctor's private sanctuary known self-explanatorily as his "masturbatorium"; and a trail of neurotic clients prominently including a brooding predatory homosexual. The basic assumption, trendy and trite as can be, is that the more eccentric, the more lunatic the vision of family life, the more truthful and insightful, the more relevant and revealing, it must be. (And never mind how tortuous the route to a punch line: the sole purpose of the dragged-out practical joke of a cat-meat stew is to enable the humorless homosexual to huff off with an "I don't eat pussy!") Annette Bening, whose presence tends to point up the kinship with American Beauty, puts on quite a show as the biological mother, running the gamut from the irrepressibly tempestuous ("Get the rage on the page, women," she rails at her fledgling poets' circle) to the chemically tranquillized, with nary a misstep along the way. This is a portrait which, floridness notwithstanding, remains recognizably and humorously human. In most of the rest, the floridness overgrows and obscures. Joseph Cross, Brian Cox, Jill Clayburgh, Gwyneth Paltrow, Evan Rachel Wood, Joseph Fiennes, Alec Baldwin. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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