If you don't mind 84 minutes of tedium of a mother and son constantly picking at each other, to get to 20 minutes of depth, then this film is for you. It was hard for me to stick with this film...and the only reason that I did was that I wanted to see Debbie Reynolds in one of her later films (although this was not as late in her career as I had thought).
For starters. with several of Albert Brooks' films my impression has been that he's sometimes boringly brilliant. With this film, the balance shifted more toward the boring part than the brilliant part.
The relationship between these sons and their mother made my family look a lot less dysfunctional. The real missed opportunity here was that so much could have been done with the mother's lost writing talents, in terms of the mother and son bonding. But no...too much itching (and I cleaned that up) at each other for too long a period of time. And I found had virtually no sympathy for the son's character...which is probably not what Brooks had in mind.
Albert Brooks is fine as an unlikable son. Debbie Reynolds is fine as an unlikable mother. Rob Morrow is fine as the unlikable other son.. And that summarizes the biggest problem with this film...there's no one to really like. They all deserve each other. And the viewer doesn't deserve to be this bored.
For starters. with several of Albert Brooks' films my impression has been that he's sometimes boringly brilliant. With this film, the balance shifted more toward the boring part than the brilliant part.
The relationship between these sons and their mother made my family look a lot less dysfunctional. The real missed opportunity here was that so much could have been done with the mother's lost writing talents, in terms of the mother and son bonding. But no...too much itching (and I cleaned that up) at each other for too long a period of time. And I found had virtually no sympathy for the son's character...which is probably not what Brooks had in mind.
Albert Brooks is fine as an unlikable son. Debbie Reynolds is fine as an unlikable mother. Rob Morrow is fine as the unlikable other son.. And that summarizes the biggest problem with this film...there's no one to really like. They all deserve each other. And the viewer doesn't deserve to be this bored.