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Tony Shalhoub’s directorial debut is a flawed but inventive parsing of feminine self-image, mother-daughter relationships, and the perils and pratfalls of middle age. Set (and filmed) in suburban Boston, it centers on a divorcée/single mother/recovering alcoholic (Shalhoub’s wife, Brooke Adams) who’s "let herself go" and the efforts of her chameleonic aspiring-cosmetologist teenage daughter (Susan Sarandon’s daughter Eva Amurri) to give mom an on-camera makeover for a documentary being filmed by Aunt Kate (Adams’s sister, Lynne, who adapted Made-Up’s script from her one-woman show). At first, mom is reluctant. Once the false eyelashes and the face-lift-on-the-cheap skin stretchers are cemented in place and the make-up is slathered on, however, she thinks she looks . . . fantastic! (In fact, she resembles a ventriloquist’s dummy in a bad wig.) Her self-esteem renewed, she meets a new man (Shalhoub) in short order. Then — surprise! — she finds she didn’t need all that faux beautifying. So the plot is predictable (and often rambling), and the acting can tip toward shrill histrionics. But Amurri is an ebullient presence, and Shalhoub turns in a humbly self-assured performance. And Shalhoub’s skilled handling of the film’s movie-within-a-movie structure — a constant motion of boom mikes and lighting rigs darting in, out of, and around the frame; surreptitiously hidden lenses that record revealing private moments — makes this an auspicious behind-the-camera beginning. (96 minutes)
BY MIKE MILIARD
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