A comedy of family shame, rooted in the personal experience of filmmaker Tamara Jenkins, and accordingly set in 1976. The premise is full of potential, even if some of that potential is down the lower road of a weekly TV sitcom. A single dad, old enough to be regularly mistaken for his children's granddad, drags his nomadic family from one seedy two-storey apartment complex (called a "dingbat," we learn) to another, but always within the Beverly Hills zip code, to ensure his children's proper education. (Curiously, we never go near the school itself.) For one halcyon stretch, when they are putting up a pill-popping pregnant cousin and receiving a monthly stipend from her father, they settle into a taller building — The Camelot of Beverly Hills — and a fully furnished apartment with "plush" carpeting. The places are documented in brutal detail, and the incidents often have a ring of truth (the "stacked" daughter commanded to wear a bra with her halter top, or caught without a tampon as a guest in another home: "Blood! Blood on my needlepoint!"), and the sense of humor understandably slips easily into a sense of pain. Most of the time, the filmmaker steers a safe middle course, though she gets good comic mileage out of a subtitled secret language and a battery-powered dildo. Among the uniformly broad performances (Alan Arkin, Marisa Tomei, David Krumholtz, Kevin Corrigan, Jessica Walter), that of Natasha Lyonne stands out but not apart: a hypersensitive observer who does not hold herself aloof from her observation. Under the untended shrub of hair, and above the cantilevered chest, the face has just the right look of perpetual startlement. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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