mean critic trashes the other sister then drowns litter of puppies

by Thomas Burchfield

So, what IS with the decor at the Embarcadero Theater? Love nests at 1000 Van Ness? Check out The Red Vic, Kabuki, The Castro and Vogue Theater in Presidio Heights.

And for real film buffs, The Roxie is a firm favorite.

It's movies like "The Other Sister" a pure Hollywood schmaltzedy now playing in Bay Area Theaters, that make me ask if I have a heart at all much less a stone one. God knows the mentally challenged deserve a lot more screen time than they get, but if this by-the-numbers romance is the best they can come up with, Hollywood may be in worse trouble than I thought.

"The Other Sister"'s plot is simple. Carla Tate (Juliette Lewis) a mentally retarded 24-year-old woman returns home from private school to her upright Republican San Francisco family dominated by her smothering mother Elizabeth (Diane Keaton), who feels desperately guilty about sending Carla away in the first place.

Elizabeth's idea of reconciliation is to smother Carla with the same zeal with which she sent her away. Carla rapidly sinks to a miserable state. She becomes determined to make it on her own, out from under the family umbrella much to her mother's trepidation. The mother-daughter conflict intensifies when Carla falls in love with Danny (Giovanni Ribisi) a fellow student at the Community college Carla attends, who is also retarded and has a passion for college marching bands.

This sets the stage for a series of intra-family conflicts that culminate when Danny rudely disrupts the wedding party of one of Carla's sisters causing the destruction of his deepening romance with Carla. Will he be able to win her back? The answer to that should be obvious and it is in a way that accents the problems running throughout the entire movie. [I'll give you a hint: "The Graduate."]

"The Other Sister" is one of those movies they call "critic proof." "How dare you knock a movie about the mentally retarded?" my conscience nags, its hands on it hips, its lips pursed, just like, well, Carla's mother. It is, after all, about members of society who receive little if any attention in the culture.

But I knock it I will. "The Other Sister" simply isn't very good. The problem lies with Garry Marshall and Bob Brunner's hackneyed, hit-the-notes- with-a-hammer screenplay. Marshall, a Hollywood veteran, who, among other things, has "Happy Days" and "Laverne and Shirley" on his resume, brings his sitcom sensibility to the film with results that cloy and annoy. The film is at times so ruthlessly cute, it teeters on the brink of patting its central characters on the head with the kind of rank condescension that only Hollywood can muster. Next to this "There's Something About Mary" seems almost enlightened.

While it's great to see retarded folks portrayed as joyously sexual, one can't help but wince when Carla asks, "I wondered who invented sex?" to which Danny replies "I think it was Madonna." "Awwwwww", we're supposed to say in response.

Awwwwww bullshit. Sure, the retarded sometimes do and say funny things, but it's easy to tell when jokes are being shoehorned in to elicit a cheap response and "The Other Sister" has them in spades. The film is not much more than a big-budget sitcom with dramatic elements. It squeezes out tears and laughs with such grim determination, it becomes apparent that Hollywood doesn't trust you, the audience, at all anymore. There is a thin line between manipulated to feel something and having it punched out of you. "The Other Sister" crosses that line repeatedly. It's a good example of the dark side of Steven Spielberg's legacy.

And at two and a quarter hours, it's interminably long. "The Other Sister" also wants to be a family saga, so it jams in scenes about mother Elizabeth's conflicts with Carla's other two sisters over issues like lesbianism and career choices [It seems that in Hollywood all unhappy families are more or less alike.] It oozes predictable contrivance from every pore. Predictability can be a pleasure, but when done in such ham-handed fashion it's simply oppressive. Its attempts at surprise aren't surprising in the least.

It takes the actors to pull the film back from the abyss. Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribisi as the two lovers are superb, managing to transcend the material with finely detailed and deeply felt performances. You can see their struggles to find the thoughts their characters can barely express. They're so good, I had to remind myself that they were actors and not actually retarded. Hector Elizondo as Danny's down to earth downstairs neighbor is also effective in his brief moments and Tom Skerritt as the Tate patriarch nicely underplays his "Father Knows Best Role." Diane Keaton's performance however feels strained and hollow like much of her other work. Also helpful are the scenes of various San Francisco locations, including the Palace of Fine Arts, Russian Hill and Candlestick Point.

I can't think of any films offhand that come close to successfully portraying the lives of the mentally retarded. If you know please tell me. They have to be better than "The Other Sister."

Next up: I burn down an orphanage. Have a nice weekend.

[CORRECTION: it has been pointed out to me that in both my review of "Gods and Monsters" and my 1998 year-end movie review I misspelled Ian McKellen's name. Please forgive me, Sir Ian.]

POSTHOC EMOTICON RATING :-(

[Thomas Burchfield can be reached at TBDeluxe@aol.com and appears regularly in Swing Time magazine.]

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