Intently, insistently, strainingly eccentric family portrait centered around a twelve-year-old boy whose mother is stricken with terminal cancer and whose father, already distracted by his crackpot inventions (e. g., a remote-control tent over the boy's bed), is distracted further by his wife's illness. So the boy opts to stay over in a dilapidated old residential hotel with Uncle Packrat and Uncle Paranoid, and his parents put up surprisingly little fuss about it: "Just pretend you're living with Dopey and Dopey." (As Dopey Number Two, Michael Richards distances himself slightly, but not sufficiently, from his imperishable Kramer persona on the Seinfeld TV series. ) Little attention, meantime, is paid at any point to the boy's little sister. Director Diane Keaton, who has experience as both a taker and a collector of still photographs, oversees some fussy visual effects: shadowy lighting, soft warm colors, sugary glazes. The ultimate effect is often quite pretty, seldom anything deeper. Except perhaps in the wool-covered eyes of anybody persuaded that eccentricity is inherently deeper than normality. Andie MacDowell, John Turturro, Maury Chaykin. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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