To complete her series on Family Trees for Cosmo magazine ("Roots for honkies," as her teenage daughter puts it), a New York writer journeys deep into the Louisiana bayou to track down her most distant relatives. In that habitat, Jill Clayburgh's carry-along sophistications and tensions, not to mention her jangling bracelets, high heels, cigarette holder, inch-long fingernails, are honestly funny, even when (or especially when) they are dishonestly ridiculous: "It's very functional," she comments on the portrait of the late and lionized family patriarch, after analyzing it as a blend of Grant Wood, Grandma Moses, and Salvador Dali. (The widow, Barbara Hershey, won't be expected to say there's a touch of Alex Katz in it, too.) But director Andrei Konchalovsky, of Runaway Train, is after something more than just a few sparks of Culture Clash. And it is hard to stay amused, at least in quite so benevolent a way, when the electricity is turned on full (shorting out altogether during the attempted rape under a dribble of molasses). The excellent cameraman, Chris Menges, exerts a kind of control, with his artfully drained colors, gray, gray-green, gray-brown, gray-blue. And Martha Plimpton, a simple country girl in River Rat, shows herself no less adept at the jaded city variety, provoking her mother all the way to that wit's-end cliché: "Right now, my opinion of you is at an all-time low!" (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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