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IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY

A comedy/drama starring Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas, and Cameron Douglas (Michael’s son and Kirk’s grandson) as members of the same family threatens the most rancid kind of feel-good-about-patriarchy lovefest. For most of its length, Fred Schepisi’s film does a skillful job of avoiding the project’s obvious pitfalls. A kaleidoscope of short scenes covers a few crisis-packed days in the lives of three generations of a wealthy Jewish family in New York City. Kirk plays a retired lawyer, Michael his lawyer son, Bernadette Peters the latter’s wife, Cameron their college-student son, and Rory Culkin his little brother. The communication problems and resentments among these five provide the film with its thematic freight, which Schepisi handles with a light touch. He also accommodates Kirk Douglas’s physical frailty and speech impairment (the result of a stroke) with unsmothering tact. The family’s path toward reconciliation comes to feel like a trudge, but when you consider the wallow in self-approval this movie could have been, that it comes so close to painlessness is gratifying. (109 minutes). At the Boston Common and the Fresh Pond and in the suburbs.

BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

Issue Date: March 2 - 8, 2003
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