"Better Living" makes for one of those viewing experiences in which it would have been nice to have the filmmaker and cast on hand after the screening so you could ask them probing, pertinent questions like, "What the heck were you thinking?"
A shrill, over-the-top, patience-testing mass of confusion written and directed by respected stage director Max Mayer, who was nevertheless able to get Olympia Dukakis, Roy Scheider and Edward Herrmann to commit -- and with performances like these they ought to be committed -- the black comedy is certain to disappear without a trace following what will be a very brief theatrical run.
While the story obviously holds deeply personal meaning for Mayer, who dedicates the film to his father, others will be left out in the cold trying to figure out what this high-pitched allegorical tale about a thoroughly dysfunctional family had in mind from the start.
Holding down the fort somewhat is Dukakis' Nora, the nuttier-by-the-minute matriarch whose behavior is beginning to disturb her three high-strung daughters (Deborah Hedwall, Catherine Corpeny and Wendy Hoopes).
For reasons that are never really clear, even to herself, Nora is tunneling out her basement to build a backyard extension to her suburban New York home. Help soon arrives in the unlikely form of her estranged husband, Tom (Scheider), a former cop who went AWOL some 15 years earlier and has returned with the intention of saving his family.
Commandeering Nora's construction project, Tom adopts a regimented and highly crazed plan of attack that threatens to permanently bust apart his already coming-apart-at-the-seams wife and daughters.
To be fair, there really isn't all that much Dukakis, Scheider and Herrmann, who plays Nora's low-key clergyman brother, can do with Mayer's grating characters and their inexplicable motivations.
Like the dug-up backyard, his script ends up throwing a lot of junk around without ever putting anything satisfactorily in place. Meanwhile, his play-it-to-the-rafters directing style, which might have fared better in a live theater setting, quickly grows obnoxious on screen.
BETTER LIVING
Cowboy Booking International
Director-screenwriter: Max Mayer
Producers: Ron Kastner, Lemore Syvan
Director of photography: Kurt Lennig
Production designer: Mark Ricker
Editor: Steve Silkenson
Costume designer: Laura Bauer
Music: John M. Davis
Color/stereo
Cast:
Nora: Olympia Dukakis
Tom: Roy Scheider
Jack: Edward Herrmann
Elizabeth: Deborah Hedwall
Maryann: Catherine Corpeny
Gail: Wendy Hoopes
Junior: James Villemaire
Running time - 97 minutes
No MPAA...
A shrill, over-the-top, patience-testing mass of confusion written and directed by respected stage director Max Mayer, who was nevertheless able to get Olympia Dukakis, Roy Scheider and Edward Herrmann to commit -- and with performances like these they ought to be committed -- the black comedy is certain to disappear without a trace following what will be a very brief theatrical run.
While the story obviously holds deeply personal meaning for Mayer, who dedicates the film to his father, others will be left out in the cold trying to figure out what this high-pitched allegorical tale about a thoroughly dysfunctional family had in mind from the start.
Holding down the fort somewhat is Dukakis' Nora, the nuttier-by-the-minute matriarch whose behavior is beginning to disturb her three high-strung daughters (Deborah Hedwall, Catherine Corpeny and Wendy Hoopes).
For reasons that are never really clear, even to herself, Nora is tunneling out her basement to build a backyard extension to her suburban New York home. Help soon arrives in the unlikely form of her estranged husband, Tom (Scheider), a former cop who went AWOL some 15 years earlier and has returned with the intention of saving his family.
Commandeering Nora's construction project, Tom adopts a regimented and highly crazed plan of attack that threatens to permanently bust apart his already coming-apart-at-the-seams wife and daughters.
To be fair, there really isn't all that much Dukakis, Scheider and Herrmann, who plays Nora's low-key clergyman brother, can do with Mayer's grating characters and their inexplicable motivations.
Like the dug-up backyard, his script ends up throwing a lot of junk around without ever putting anything satisfactorily in place. Meanwhile, his play-it-to-the-rafters directing style, which might have fared better in a live theater setting, quickly grows obnoxious on screen.
BETTER LIVING
Cowboy Booking International
Director-screenwriter: Max Mayer
Producers: Ron Kastner, Lemore Syvan
Director of photography: Kurt Lennig
Production designer: Mark Ricker
Editor: Steve Silkenson
Costume designer: Laura Bauer
Music: John M. Davis
Color/stereo
Cast:
Nora: Olympia Dukakis
Tom: Roy Scheider
Jack: Edward Herrmann
Elizabeth: Deborah Hedwall
Maryann: Catherine Corpeny
Gail: Wendy Hoopes
Junior: James Villemaire
Running time - 97 minutes
No MPAA...
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