István Szabó's rambling, irresolute historical saga focuses on a rags-to-riches Budapest Jewish family who despite their rosy-sounding name -- Sonnenschein, German for "Sunshine" -- have a knack for picking losers. When ambitious Ignatz, son of family patriarch Emmanuel (David de Keyser) and heir to the family health-tonic fortune, predicts on New Year's Eve 1900 that the new century will be one of peace and love, I wondered whether he wasn't suffering from a genetic tendency to misperception. And so it goes, one Sonnenschein generation after another as they fecklessly link themselves to the doomed and depraved regimes of recent European history: Ignatz, who changes the family name to the more Magyar-sounding "Sors" (Hungarian for "destiny"), with the Habsburgs; his son Adam with the pro-Nazi Hungarian nationalists; Adam's son Ivan with the Communists.

It's a tale of individualism versus assimilation, not so much whether Jews should trade their identity for success as whether anyone should compromise his or her own morals to survive the wretched flood of history. Either way, it seems, you'll end up like Ralph Fiennes, who plays the three successive sons with equal portions of angst and arrogance. On the brighter side there's the enduring presence of matriarch Valerie (Jennifer Ehle, Rosemary Harris), who finds solace in taking pictures of beauty. There are beautiful pictures aplenty in Sunshine, some of them horrific, but in the end Szabó and co-screenwriter Israel Horovitz leave us with platitudes as syrupy as the family cure-all.