Watching CBS's "Surrender, Dorothy", I kept wondering why Diane Keaton would want to be in it (not because it's a television movie--with the dearth of enticing roles for slightly older actresses, it isn't any wonder why Academy Award winning performers such as Keaton turn to TV--but because it offers no opportunities for Keaton to shine). A single mother, grieving the sudden death of her twenty-something daughter, imposes upon--and gradually becomes friends with--the group of young people her daughter was close to at the time of her accident. Adapted from the novel, this teleplay gives us a group of self-absorbed characters one would cross the street to avoid. Aside from being coarse and dim, these phony people are incredibly unconvincing, as is the tidy scenario and the bungalow near the beach where the kids reside (one young man, who wears muscle shirts to tell us he's gay, hears Diane Keaton say, "Surrender, Dorothy" and actually asks, "That's from "The Wizard of Oz", right?"...no, genius, it's from "Citizen Kane"!). Keaton may have wanted to do this material based on the subject matter of confronting death. She tries turning this distinctly unlikable woman into a shadow of her own personage (lots of kooky outfits), but it doesn't sit well with the viewer since Keaton has always been warmly likable and flexible in a flaky way. Here, she's a crazed harpy who doesn't learn many lessons on her journey of self-discovery (the movie quickly forgets it's about a dead young woman and becomes an odyssey for the nervous wreck of a mom, who appears to be an overage hippie who has never lost anyone close to her). This is the kind of film actors promote on talk shows with the caveat, "It should help a lot of grieving mothers out there". I can't imagine it helping anyone since it is intrinsically a downer, muddled and baffling. It's deranged.
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