Comedy with some bright moments and a clever idea but it never seems to get going. I think the problems are structural – maybe it should have been a play. Jennifer Aniston worries that her mother might have been the Katherine Ross character in The Graduate, and when you see Shirley MacLaine is cast as the inspiration for Mrs Robinson you think “this is going to be great”.
It starts brightly, with Aniston finding out the family history at a wedding, with strong support performances from Mark Ruffalo (her fiancée), Mena Survini (her blonde bimbo sister), Kathy Bates (a lush-y Pasadena type) and of course MacLaine.
It starts to go a bit downhill when Aniston (in pretty good form actually) then tracks down Dustin Hoffman, who is Kevin Costner (who hasn’t aged that well but conversely is ten years too young for the role – it needed Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman or someone). Once we find out he’s not dad, it becomes a case of their romance, which isn’t terribly involving.
They don’t really use The Graduate stuff – if they were, it would be about Aniston, Costner and MacLaine – and they would have the Katherine Ross character still alive, and also deal more with Aniston’s father. Instead they concentrate on Aniston wondering why she feels as though she can’t fit in to her family and why she can’t commit to Ruffalo, which is a fine sub text thing or B plot but not enough for a film. So the last 15 minutes of so it’s like “alright, who cares?” Rob Reiner used to be so strong on story but he keeps making errors lately – like for Alex and Emma and this.
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