MARVIN'S ROOM (53)

Directed by: Jerry Zaks

Starring: Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Leonardo di Caprio, Robert de Niro, Gwen Verdon

The Pitch: A shallow, oppressive woman travels with her two sons - one of them a pyromaniac under psychiatric care - to the house where her estranged sister is (a) looking after their bed-ridden father and (b) dying of leukemia. Cue major bonding.

Theo Sez: Surprisingly painless, given the cinema-emptying potential of its synopsis (how do films like this get greenlighted?). As with many Southern-flavoured family-ensemble pieces - the under-rated CRIMES OF THE HEART, say - it's quirky rather than nakedly emotional about family conflicts (you could say it's closer to the ghost of Tennessee Williams than Eugene O'Neill) : the various eccentrics are effectively, if a mite self-consciously comic, with Verdon stealing the show as twinkly, half-senile Aunt Ruth - greeting her nephews with a big hug and the tender (if tactless) line, "Now which of you two handsome boys is in the mental institution?" - and it even manages to deflect the much-dreaded sentimental climax into something palatably low-key. Clearly it's a film made with dignity ; but dignity is one thing and truth, alas, quite another. Even before the orgy of bonding that takes up most of its second half this is a spectacularly phony movie, the chalk-and-cheese sisters at its core - sweet-tempered frump and self-centred slattern - not so much a believable pairing as a chance (respectively) for Keaton to practise her crow's-feet-and-nervous- laughter routine and Streep to show that she has Range. It's skilful but basically doomed, a film that strives for a philosophical humanism but is so in thrall to corporate values that philosophical humanism co-exists with an extended, synergy-induced plug for Walt Disney World. Oh, and di Caprio is definitely starting to look too old for teenage roles.