It Runs in the Family

Plot synopsis:
The story involves a highly successful New York City family, each with its set of problems, and highlights the difficulties of the father-son relationship. Mitchell Gromberg is dealing with health problems resulting from a stroke. (Kirk Douglas himself suffered a stroke in 1996.) His son Alex works as a lawyer in the firm that his father founded, but is questioning the usefulness of his work and his place in the family. Alex's son, Asher, does not take college seriously and seems lost. The youngest son is 11 year old Eli, who is extremely intelligent, while being socially awkward and is entering a difficult pre-adolescent time.
Alex indulges in a thoughtless and careless brief romantic fling with Suzie at the soup kitchen they volunteer at, and his psychologist wife Rebecca discovers it, threatening their marriage. When Evelyn Gromberg, Mitchell's wife and Alex's mother dies, the family comes together to heal. At Evelyn's funeral in suburban New York, Rebecca tells Alex that she knows about his romantic fling. Alex and Mitchell talk about past hurts.
Back at their home in New York City, Asher is discovered with illegal drugs. Although devastated, Rebecca and Mitchell are supportive and vow to get help for Asher. Mitchell's older brother Stephen dies and he, Alex and Asher give him a farewell send-off. Although he is forced to sleep on the living room couch, Mitchell tells Rebecca that he wants to make peace; she agrees.

Tags: prank

Review:
I think the only person who's not a member of the Douglas clan in 'It Runs In The Family' is director Fred Schepisi.
This is the first time that Kirk & Michael have worked together since the son's bit part in dad's '66 war drama 'Cast A Giant Shadow'.
Bernadette Peters and Rory Culkin round out the headlining cast as the mother and youngest son of the Gromberg family.This picture received plenty of publicity in spring '03 because it was a rare on-screen appearance by movie god Kirk Douglas.
Michael isn't stretching himself (although you can read the reverence for his dad in his eyes) and while Bernadette Peters & Rory Culkin do a nice job, they're merely providing low-key support to the Douglas gang.
But the acting ability, the skill in projecting emotion, the cunning character who draws the viewer into a picture - Kirk Douglas is STILL Kirk Douglas.The story is pedestrian, soap operish, New York, Jewish culture-inflected (Kirk Douglas rediscovered his Jewish roots not that long ago, celebrated an aged man's well-publicized Bar Mitzvah and wrote a book about his renewed commitment to Judaism).
His son, Michael, not exactly unknown to the screen, is his son in "It Runs in the Family" and no amount of acting need substitute for the palpably real love between the characters.
But the ending...well, see it.Some folks seem to have a real problem viewing Kirk Douglas act WITH and THROUGH his controlled but ineradicable disability.
I wonder.See the film not because it's a great story - we've seen these melodramatic episodes many times over - but for the pleasure of watching people connected in real life explore myriad challenges with passion, humor, empathy and caring.7/10..
I seriously enjoyed watching Michael and Kirk Douglas working together, found the material touching and poignant, and found myself caring deeply about the characters.
The Douglas family really pulled it off without making it a vanity.Although I agree with other ratings on IMDB, I feel that this movie is underrated here.(6.5/10).
My interest to watch this movie,was primarily due to seeing three generations from the Douglas-clan acting together.It is definitely not a movie you watch twice,the plot is predictable,one might even say that a plot does not exist.But the whole atmosphere of this big family,with their happy moments,sorrows,quarrels is well pictured.I was impressed by old Kirk,who at his age acts quite well.Watching him behaving like an old man who still wants to play a role and be a decision maker in his family,made me think of the sometimes sad aspects of getting older.The scene when he danced with his wife,before her upcoming death ,is moving.Also himself jogging and being thrown down to earth by youngsters passing by, who are neglecting his fall.He is hurt,but he does not cry,he takes it with dignity.The uneasy life of an old man ,who has his difficulties but refuses to be a looser.And he certainly gets the sympathy of the audience through this.We cannot neglect the old people around us,trying to live further in this speedy and sometimes selfish world ,which gets less sensible towards them and finds less time to comfort them.But this movie could make us more indulgent with old people.This could be the message of this movie,besides being an occasion to watch acting three generations of the Douglas family..
It's a bit interesting to see virtually the entire Douglas family involved in this movie, which makes watching the interaction between the characters feel rather eerie.
However, it was good to see Kirk Douglas in a movie again, and it only seemed fitting he do it with much of his extended family.
I was not particularly anxious to see this film but it was a rainy Saturday (the day after it opened in my area) so I dragged my movie-hating husband to see It Runs In The Family not really knowing what to expect.
I had seen Michael Douglas on several tv talk shows and each time he mentioned his nervousness over his son's acting--well he didn't need to worry - Cameron carried the movie!!!
The first Mrs, Kirk Douglas (Michael's real-life mother Diana) was a delight.
A year after his stroke, grandfatherly Kirk Douglas (as Mitchell "Pappy" Gromberg) is in remarkable shape, and is seeing a speech therapist.
Happily married son Michael Douglas (as Alex) is nonetheless having a hard time fighting off the urge to merge with a hot co-volunteer.
The greater Douglas/Douglas pairing fizzles like a senile uncle's gas at the supper table.**** It Runs in the Family (4/25/03) Fred Schepisi ~ Michael Douglas, Kirk Douglas, Cameron Douglas, Bernadette Peters.
There might have been a good film project in pairing Kirk Douglas and his son Michael.
Oddly, the storyline was that of a dysfunctional family with many embarrassing scenes, including one jaw-dropper with Kirk and Michael setting a boat ablaze as a funeral pyre with Kirk's dead brother aboard.
In their film careers, both Kirk and Michael Douglas consistently showed good taste in their film projects.
There is some element of a tribute to the great acting career of Kirk Douglas, who plays an elderly father of Michael Douglas.
Yes, it happens in the best of families.Kirk and Michael Douglas are the Brombergs-father and son, who are constantly bickering.As in real life, Kirk is the stroke victim and his wife is on dialysis.
I want to remember Kirk Douglas for "Champion," "Lust for Life," "The Bad and the Beautiful." I don't want to remember a poor script and a story that goes awry.
I think there are sincere moments between the real life father and son that help the movie.
Unfortunately, Cameron Douglas, Michael's son, is wasted in a wildly underwritten part and his character comes across as unsympathetic.
It isn't the least bit fair to call "It Runs in the Family" a "vanity project."With three generations, Kirk and Michael and Cameron Douglas, and Douglas by marriage Diana all in it, the movie is certainly a FAMILY project, and despite the direction of the great Fred Schepisi, whose "Six Degrees of Separation" was a miracle of acting and editing, it somehow doesn't ever really soar.
But dad (Mitchell) has had a stroke, and his son (Alex), who has refused to become a partner, is torn between profit and pro bono cases, loyalty and infidelity, and has none of the brass or verve of the high powered Michael Douglas of "Wall Street." (Michael's performance isn't particularly strong here either, but the other Douglases' all are.) He and his therapist wife Rebecca (Bernadette Peters) have two kids nine years apart.
Mitchell's wife is played by Michael's actual mother, the regal Diana Douglas, whom Kirk divorced in 1951 but has remained good friends with.The kids in the family are not showing great promise.
As Eli, the very forthright and self-possessed Rory Culkin, from another famous acting family, seems too self-contained and sure of himself to be seen as truly having problems.
His main problem seems to be that he's 12.Cameron Douglas, Michael's real life son, whose acting experience is chiefly from a TV series, is Asher, the 21-year-old "laid back" son, a loveable loser who deals some pot and misses a lot of his classes but knows how to party and is a good deejay.
The story never works out any of the problems it creates for its characters or fully develops them, but it does succeed in its purpose of being a story about family and about honest acceptance of human frailty.Kirk as the aging patriarch, who loses his wife and then his demented brother, brings us in for some embarrassment (his scenes are the most cornball sentimental), but you can't help admiring the 86-year-old actor's enormous pluck.
Whether his blustery authority mixed with emotional distance is true to the man himself, it's believable in his scenes with his wife and son.One aspect -- also arguably anti-vanity, yet both proud and truthful, is that the Douglases are playing what they really are, a successful Jewish family, and not the sanitized non-ethnic Americans that Hollywood required when Kirk was in his prime.
And because the movie shows a seder and funeral and identifies the family with Jewish ritual, we do get a sense of family life as a part of cultural tradition.Mitchell's wife Rebecca gets upset when she discovers women's undies in his pocket that came from a scene  at a free food project where a fellow volunteer (Sarita Chudoury) has the hots for him (nothing subtle about this encounter).
She can engender little sympathy nor convey much sense of an active intelligence.There are way more crises than any family could handle in this short span of time:  marital problems, two deaths of elders, a child who runs off during a school function, the older boy flunking out of school and arrested for drugs, his first serious love affair ruined, the patriarch facing "a few good years left" alone.
Maybe in the end all that really mattered was for Kirk and Michael finally to make a movie together after all these years, and the process created too many good vibes to allow for edginess or wit.
And it's creepy to watch Kirk Douglas's ex-wife play his loving wife in the  movie.
Though It Runs In the Family could have been Kirk Douglas's swan song, his signature on his career as The Shootist was for John Wayne, the man went out and did another after this.
Kirk is the patriarch of the Gromberg family and son Michael and grandson Cameron play the same roles in the film.
Even former wife Diana Douglas, Michael's real life mom, plays grandma.
In the end the family is all brought closer together.Kirk did his own homage to one of his former starring roles, The Vikings, when he and Michael take his brother's body and give him a viking funeral on a lake.
The only one I did like was Kirk Douglas' wife.
It is sad to watch this movie with Michael Douglas's son Cameron, who is in jail for drugs until 2018, and then to know his stepbrother died in 2004 from a drug overdose.
You might think Kirk Douglas incapable of appearing in really bad movies but he's done a stinker or two and this one definitely qualifies.
It borrows liberally from another movie where Dan Akroyd played Kirk's troubled adult son and Kirk, having suffered a recent stroke, had to make him believe before the credits rolled that he always loved him and did the best he could for him.
In short, this movie is phony, false, forced, and exploitive of Kirk Douglas's various handicaps following his stroke.
"The Long Riders", "The Fabulous Baker Boys" and "On Golden Pond" are three very good films that come to mind.While watching "It Runs In The Family", I felt I was seeing the Douglas family (with "guest stars" Bernadette Peters and Rory Culkin) going through the motions.
She gave the best performance in this very disappointing movie."It Runs In The Family" wants to be another "On Golden Pond".
(I guess Rory Culkin was made an honorary Douglas for the occasion -- but then again his own family history more than qualifies him.) If we can leave that peculiarity out for a moment, however, I think we have here a reasonably veridical, if painful, portrayal of a very assimilated New York Jewish family that has lost its way.
Trans-generational difficulties may be common to all classes of people, but that doesn't mean that the problems of the rich are therefore equivalent to the problems of those just barely getting by.For example, what about the life of the poor gal working at the soup kitchen with the successful lawyer father of the story, who volunteers his time there for ideological reasons, but nevertheless finds justification for having sex with her on the side?
Films like Rushmore, The Royal Tannenbaums and now Keep it in the Family all seem to set out to do little more than wallow in dysfunctionality and appear created with the only objective of wasting two hours of their audience's lives.
Kirk Douglas stars as Mitchell Gromberg, the head patriarch of the family and Evelyn Gromberg plays his wife which is the real life ex-wife of Kirk's, Diana Douglas.
Their lawyer son is Alex played by Kirk's real-life son Michael Douglas who also served the movie's producer.
While the film is running, one has to wonder how the relationship between Mitchell and Alex close reflect to the rel-life bonding of Kirk and Michael.
In addition to this family casting is Cameron Douglas in his debut as the elder grandson Asher.
The movie reflects upon the interactions of the the characters, which is apropos to the personal experiences that the Douglas family has encountered over the years.
The remaining cast includes Rory Culkin's role as Asher's younger brother Eli and Bernadette Peters as Alex's psychiatrist wife, Rebecca.
Sure there's tragedy in the movie that has two members die, but their deaths symbolize the distance the family has upon each other and it was never padded on for good measure.The complexity of the story wheels upon the various family issues as they try to thrive upon the need to succeed, the values of love and dominance, while facing the tribulations of grief, and moving on in a new chapter of life regardless of age.
The acting was brilliant and it is a great slice of life, so if you like emotional tearjerkers, then this movie's for you.
The Gromberg family is a family with some problems.The patriarch of the family, Mitchell Cromberg is an old man just waiting for his death after a stroke he has suffered.But according to doctor he still has a few good years left.His wife Evelyn isn't young, either.His lawyer son Alex has some issues with his father.There are also some problems with his wife Rebecca.His son Asher is in college and does drugs.The younger son Eli is socially awkward.It Runs in the Family (2003 is directed by Fred Schepisi.It puts some members of the family Douglas together in this movie.Kirk Douglas,a true legend, plays Mitchell.His son Michael Douglas is Alex.It was a real pleasure watching those father-son moments.It His son I really enjoyed watching all those Douglases together..
Good Family Movie.
It Runs in the family is a great movie to watch with family.
If you want a great family movie to watch, this one is the one or if you want a comedy, this movie has some scenes that has some funny moments.
The Douglas Family - they're all here, Michael, his son Cameron, and his mom and dad, both Kirk and Diana.
The movie makes an excuse for Kirk's ANNOYING speech impediment, by giving his character the same problem he has in real life.
Did not particularly like the performance of Cameron Douglas who is Michaels son.
Michael and Kirk Douglas play off each other well, which one either might expect from an actor son and father, or might not, given their lengthy careers and egos.But the bad news is that the movie is mundane.
The combo of players in that movie is sure interesting, with Kirk and Michael Douglas playing together.
As far as acting goes, he needs a few more classes by step-mom Catherine and assorted Douglases if Cameron Douglas wants to make it in films.
As far as the rest of the family, Diana Douglas, as Evelyn, has such a dignified aura about herself that one wonders why did she ever stop appearing in films when she had so much to give.
Kirk Douglas, as Mitchell, is to be commended by his courage in appearing in this film.The other problem is Michael's Alex Gromberg.
Six out of five stars, it will likely get excellent reviews (then do lousy in the box office)Not being particularly a fan of the Douglas clan, I was not expecting to enjoy this movie.
I watched it 2 times, very endearing, each plot if carefully paid attention to can make you either sympathize or laugh or even cry, it's sweet, the father/son/grandson is adorable, funny, witty, and I think it touched my heart during the deaths of Pappys wife and brother..
It's hard to imagine your life partner gone after so long...and then to lose your brother within the same time, I think Michael and Kirk did a wonderful job, and "Asher" was an eye opener to anyone trying to stay as a teenager even when they should have priorities.
I admire Kirk Douglas for making this movie, still recovering from his stroke.
Certain people were no doubt disappointed, I feel, because they might have sat down expecting a more purposeful plot - whereas what is delivered instead is really more of an episodic musing on familial bonds.For all those old-school Kirk Douglas fans who moan that here he's nothing like he was in his 'glory days' - they're right, he isn't; but the scene where his character finds his wife dead was still without doubt the most affecting in the movie.
I hope the Douglas family (Kirk, Michael, Diana, and Cameron) had a good time making this film, because I didn't enjoy watching it.
It Runs in the Douglas Family..
It Runs in the Family (2003): Dir: Fred Schepisi / Cast: Michael Douglas, Kirk Douglas, Rory Culkin, Bernadette Peters, Cameron Douglas: Wonderful and thought provoking comedy about traits passed down.
It stars real life father and son duo Kirk and Michael Douglas.
Kirk Douglas is dealing with the passing of his wife and the negativity he passed down to his son.
It is interesting to see three generations of the Douglas family on screen together.
I'm a Michael Douglas fan, but this film has made me a Kirk Douglas fan too, I was so impressed by the courage of this 88+ actor - OK his stroke has left him with a speech defect but wow, he can still act!
Diana Douglas was wonderful - made me wonder why she and Kirk ever divorced as the love between them was so apparent (or was it just good acting??).