MOTHER (63)

Directed by: Albert Brooks

Starring: Albert Brooks, Debbie Reynolds, Rob Morrow

The Pitch: Trying to get to the root of his emotional problems, a fortyish novelist decides to move back in with his mother.

Theo Sez: Intermittently priceless movie, but still a vaguely disappointing Albert Brooks movie : the self-deprecating edge that makes his persona so satisfying is missing here - does he even realise how neurotically over-defensive his character is? Probably, but to say so would've clashed with the film's rather tiresome schema, which has him playing straight-man to Reynolds as his overbearing, monstrously non-nurturing mother. Their first big scene together, as she merrily ignores or misunderstands everything he says while cutting him unwanted slivers from an industrial-size slab of three-year-old cheese, is a definitive (and hilarious) snapshot of the chasm between grown-up children and impossible parents ; the rest of it is variations on that same joke, interspersed with apparently (and unfortunately) straight-faced psychobabble and culminating in an orgy of healing so unapologetic it's almost - but almost - touching. The only really interesting parts are the Oedipal undertones - notably our hero's brother, whose fixation on Mom borders on the psychotic - but, unsurprisingly, they remain teasingly inchoate. Will movies ever come up with a sharp, no-holds-barred picture of the weird, guilt-ridden sadomasochism in mother-son relationships? Not while most of them are made by men, that's for sure.