Dir. Terry Kinney, US, 2008, 89 mins
Cast: Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, Virginia Madsen
Review by Carol Allen
This appears to be an attempt to make a gentle comedy about eccentric characters, which is also trying to say something serious about ageing and dementia. Based on the novel of the same name by Sherwood Kiraly, the script fails to make the transition successfully from printed page to screen.
Chicago newspaper man Cooper (Broderick) is suffering from memory lapses after a concussion. His mother (Lois Smith) calls him back to his rural Missouri home town to see his Uncle Rollie (Alda), who's also having memory problems or, as the doctors put it, is demonstrating "diminished capacity". He's certainly eccentric, one of his quirks being to fit a manual typewriter with fishhooks at the river's edge, believing that when the fish nibble and activate the keys, they are writing poetry. His house is a shambles and he's obsessed with what we used to call here a "cigarette card" of a once famous Chicago baseball player, given to him by his father, which he keeps losing track of and which he thinks is worth a lot of money. On that point he's right, as it turns out. Meanwhile, Cooper is getting back together with his now divorced ex-girlfriend Charlotte (Madsen), who also appears to have an obsession, in her case about the sugar content of food. She has a really stupid, drunken brother (Jim True-Frost), who tags along and keeps trying to steal the baseball card, when this little band heads back to Chicago to a collector's convention to sell Rollie's treasure and provide for his care.
Broderick and Madsen struggle to breath life into characters who frankly aren't really very interesting and the people at the convention are as boring as you'd expect people to be, whose lives centre round baseball and collecting cigarette cards. The one exception is Bobby Cannavale as a ruthless dealer who tries to rip Rollie off. Alda is always worth watching and he does bring a touching quality to Rollie's confusion and efforts to remember his past. There is a very poignant moment when Cooper is told by a doctor regarding his and Rollie's memory that the difference between them is that he will get better but his uncle won't. But even Alda's folksy charm becomes a bit irritating after a while and the American cultural ethos of the piece is somewhat alienating to a non-American audience.
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