A family affair.
It Runs in the Family stars 86-year-old movie star, novelist, charity fundraiser and stroke survivor Kirk Douglas as the patriarch of the Grombergs, a wealthy Jewish family, and Michael Douglas as Kirk's son (the role he was born to play?). Michael's son Cameron plays his movie son (repeat joke), and Michael's brother Joel is credited as an associate producer. The most impressive piece of casting is Diana Douglas as Michael's mother (repeat joke). Diana and Kirk were divorced over 50 years ago "but have remained close friends," says the press kit. Normally I'd doubt it; but hey, they did make a movie together, and Diana Douglas is superb as a tough-broad-turned-society-wife (or is that the other way around?).
Jesse Wigutow's script could be bound in a collection of screenplays titled, "American family dramas wherein Americans behave like stereotypical hearty foreigners." That mythical volume's table of contents would include Once Around, Home for the Holidays, The Ref and other movies that mix cruelty and sentiment-movies I happen to like quite a bit. Much of the humor is base: the patriarch's paraplegic, emotionally shattered war-veteran brother going flatulent at the dinner table; doper son Asher (Cameron Douglas) rushing away from an all-elbows basketball game and puking into a trash can; Asher's eerily quiet, sex-obsessed, prepubescent brother, Eli (Rory Culkin), innocently asking mom (Bernadette Peters) if she and dad ever 69. (The latter gag is the one unredeemably lame moment in the movie-a throwback to one of the dumbest cliches of 1970s movies.)
Can this kind of movie be good? Yes, but it can never appeal to everybody, which is why I qualify my praise. Family's lead performances flirt with theatricality, or, to borrow an affection adjective from Orson Welles, "bigness," but they stay on the right side of realism. The film is directed by Fred Schepisi, an Australian who never works in the same genre twice, and who (unlike most critically approved director-heroes) never lets his own virtuosity become the subject. Family is a more outwardly accessible film than his previous work, Last Orders, a fleet-footed ensemble drama that crosscut between different periods in the lives of four friends from the 1940s. This one is a glossy domestic comedy-drama with no fancy framing devices or editing tricks; just a story about people, a crowd-pleasing Hollywood movie with a bit of soul and grit. The people are worth knowing.
I liked the Grombergs even though they're unlikable people-a sure sign that the characters and situations, however exaggerated, have a core of truth. Schepisi and Wigutow want to entertain us, but they also want to be honest about their characters and human nature generally. The grandfather, Mitchell, wins a certain amount of sympathy for having survived a stroke (he slurs his speech a bit) and for being played by Kirk Douglas. But he's not an inherently sympathetic character. He's a controlling know-it-all, a cold fish, a workaholic, a bad father and a fairly crude person. On learning that grandson Asher has a girlfriend, he asks, "You poked her yet?"
Boomer son Alex, a high-powered lawyer drifting back into liberal causes, is only slightly less unbearable. Alex isn't as involved with his kids' lives as he'd like to think, and his wiseacre sense of humor camouflages selfishness, materialism and a very deep sense of entitlement. Alex's wife, Rebecca, is one of those college-educated, liberal moms who still can't believe how much her children dominate her life.
Grandson Asher is a DJ, ladies' man and pot dealer, completely irresponsible and certain to flunk out of college soon, but almost irresistibly likable Cameron Douglas, who has never acted in a feature film before, is terrific. He has charisma equal to, but different from, that of his dad and granddad-a rocker/ surfer/rapper vibe, macho yet passive, and very funny. (When a potential one night stand asks about a phone number scrawled on Asher's hand, Asher says, "It's the number of the Mt. Sinai Medical Hospital burn unit, in case things get a little too hot tonight.")
Asher's kid brother, Eli, is bookish and intense, forever analyzing others' experiences in comparison with his own; Eli's own mother admits she has no clue what makes the boy tick. (Culkin's performance is his best yet. For reasons I can't fully explain, he reminded me of a baby Dustin Hoffman.)
A snowballing series of family crises, which I won't reveal here, pushes the family members together just as the centrifugal force of modern life threatens to pull them apart, or drag them down. In the end, the Grombergs don't really learn anything about themselves-who would want to watch them if they did? But they make a few concessions, so that their lives and their relatives' lives can be more enjoyable and less dramatic.
The best thing about Family is its texture. Schepisi and his collaborators have a keen eye for the fleeting grace note, the telling detail, the single shot or camera move that will express a key theme. "Never get old," Mitchell mutters, after which the camera slowly dollies past him, gliding over a framed series of photographs taken at different points in Mitchell's life. Ian Baker's widescreen images, often shot with a fast-gliding Steadicam, are beautiful but not pretty-hard, bemused. Schepisi and his current editor, Kate Williams, don't experiment with point of view and time-shifting as they did in Last Orders-perhaps the most ambitiously edited narrative feature since The Limey-but they're still nimble and surprising. Each shot lasts exactly as long as it should and not a second longer.
The movie has a lot of loose ends. Whole subplots are alluded to but barely seen, and a couple of payoffs that were promised at the outset don't actually materialize. At 109 minutes, the same length as Last Orders, it feels a bit too short. But that's a small price to pay for a movie that delivers much of what a Hollywood movie should, while resolutely giving you other, better things as well. One such better thing is Kirk Douglas' performance, which swung me over to the point of view that good actors should keep acting no matter what. Douglas hams it up, not theatrically, but realistically, the way powerful old men often ham it up in real life, and he never asks for sympathy. In fact, he confounds it at every turn. The character is full of himself and just plain full of it, yet you respect his achievements, his guts, his life force. Schepisi honors the man's energy and toughness by framing many key moments in medium wide shot so you can see that it really is Douglas getting knocked to the ground, dancing with a woman or tossing a lit Zippo. Good for him, and good for the movie.