Saccharine Sentimentality, Artfully Sour-Coated

Rating: 7/10 (14 August 2006)

I felt angry that I liked this movie. It was clearly formulaic: from the stock characters (Foul- Mouthed but Heart-of-Gold Grampy, Long-Suffering Voice of Reason Mom, Angsty Teenage boy) who follow fairly predictable story arcs, classic situation comedy moments (verging on slapstick, as though National Lampoon kept on trying to get into your quiet dinner party) poorly justified, and the consistent ratio of feel-good sentimentality to lightly-twisted. The overall feeling is of something painfully sweet that has been calculatedly sour-coated, as opposed to something sour which has been sugarcoated. And yet the script keeps you guessing just-enough (about how they will do something, not what will happen next), and the predictable is artfully sidestepped or twisted ever-so slightly, so that one is left with very little concrete to complain about. In addition, solid performances by an above-average cast (Greg Kinnear and Alan Arkin often sell lines that in lesser hands would sound like they were written by a maudlin computer program) save the day. In a sense the whole film seemed like what you would get if you forced Wes Anderson to follow all of the rules of a beginning scriptwriting class. It is a feel-good movie packaged and seamlessly designed to be digestible to movie snobs, and, infuriatingly, it succeeds, like a sweater you really like and are ashamed to admit comes from... the Gap.