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Friday, April 25, 2003
Dullness runs in this 'Family'
Michael Douglas looked long for a project to do with daddy Kirk. After the old man's stroke, he surely realized that time was running out and rushed this cinematic family affair forward.
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In addition to Kirk, whose crotchety old patriarch contributes most of the film's attitude and all of its sass through slurred but expressive speech, Michael managed to get his mother, Diana, and son, Cameron, to join them on screen and brother Joel behind-the-scenes as an associate producer.
Michael is Alex Gromberg, a miserable corporate lawyer grinding his days away at the firm his father, Mitchell (Kirk), founded. He still bristles at the snarky criticisms that Mitchell tosses his way at holiday gatherings and you can almost hear his silent vow to be a better father to his sons ("you didn't set the bar too high," he reminds Mitchell).
His ideal of family togetherness can be seen in the photos that trim every scene, portraits of the family caught in moments of shared triumph and joy, beaming their happiness out of the picture frames.
In reality, for all his pep talks and moral support, Alex is an absentee parent to college slacker and amiable underachiever Asher (Cameron Douglas) and sixth-grade loner Eli (Rory Culkin), and is hardly present in his own marriage.
Director Fred Schepisi, whose gentle hand and easy rhythms can dig deep into the heart of his characters and their relationships with understanding warmth (from "Roxanne" to "Last Orders"), merely meanders here. He reaches for the texture of family dynamics and achieves, finally, a lived-in sense to their relationships.
The problem is that what runs in the Gromberg family -- the inability of the men to express themselves -- also runs through the script. The result is a story that, despite two funerals (one of them a fiery Viking send-off), a drug bust, an adolescent street brawl and a marriage cracked by near infidelity (can't the film even give us the real thing?), comes out indistinct, uneventful and amiably dull. This is one family reunion where you need someone to act up or pick a fight, anything to bring a little life to the party.
Sean Axmaker is a movie reviewer and free-lance film writer based in Seattle. He can be reached via e-mail at seanax@hotmail.com.
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