85 MINUTES

As the title might suggest, Jane Anderson’s adaptation of Terry Ryan’s memoir shows the lighter side of living a lifetime with an abusive alcoholic. Kelly (Woody Harrelson) seems like a wholesome ’50s-era dad. But after a few beers and a Cleveland Indians loss, he mutates into a raging, self-pitying, appliance-battering beast. To support their 10 children, his perfect homemaker wife, Evelyn (Julianne Moore, breaking out her Far from Heaven wardrobe again), enters, and wins, a variety of promotional contests. At its best, the film evokes without comment the absurdity, grotesquerie, and black comedy of this real-life parody of patriarchal normality. Harrelson never stumbles as he ranges from the terrifying to the pitiful, and Moore’s brittle façade of propriety cracks only rarely to allow a glimpse of the anger, contempt, and determination within. But in her feature debut Anderson has aspirations of being a stylist, and her postmodernist crotchets trivialize this harrowing, hilarious fable of the American family.