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BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
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A comedy/drama starring Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas, and Cameron Douglas (Michael’s son and Kirk’s grandson) as members of the same family threatens the most rancid kind of feel-good-about-patriarchy lovefest. For most of its length, Fred Schepisi’s film does a skillful job of avoiding the project’s obvious pitfalls. A kaleidoscope of short scenes covers a few crisis-packed days in the lives of three generations of a wealthy Jewish family in New York City. Kirk plays a retired lawyer, Michael his lawyer son, Bernadette Peters the latter’s wife, Cameron their college-student son, and Rory Culkin his little brother. The communication problems and resentments among these five provide the film with its thematic freight, which Schepisi handles with a light touch. He also accommodates Kirk Douglas’s physical frailty and speech impairment (the result of a stroke) with unsmothering tact. The family’s path toward reconciliation comes to feel like a trudge, but when you consider the wallow in self-approval this movie could have been, that it comes so close to painlessness is gratifying. (109 minutes). At the Boston Common and the Fresh Pond and in the suburbs.
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