REVIEWED - BECAUSE I SAID SO:WITH Mother's Day looming, perhaps you daughters out there would like to take your mums to see this light-hearted comedy about a crazy, kooky mother and her kooky, crazy daughters. Or perhaps you'd prefer to stop at the nearest petrol station and buy Mom the scraggiest, patchiest, most overpriced and most dubiously perfumed bunch of flowers you can find.
I'd go with the flowers. They'll seem thoughtful and original, all wrapped up in a bow, beside the roaringly haphazard exercise in cynicism that is Because I Said So, the latest vehicle for Diane Keaton's now pitifully self-parodying career, .
This is the nasty little untruth spouted by every one of Keaton's major roles in the last 10 years: that when Annie Hall grew up, she went from eccentric to insane, her endearing ditsiness jackknifed by a truckload of screeching hormones which has turned her into a succession of silly middle-aged women obsessed by silly middle-aged things. (Even her character's death from cancer in The Family Stone played second fiddle, dramatically, to her bitchiness and jealousy when introduced to her eldest son's new flame.)
In this new film from Michael Lehmann, who started out so sharply with Heathers in 1989 and has trundled steadily into fun-and-fuzzy territory ever since, Keaton plays Daphne, the divorced mother of three adult daughters who is consumed by limb-jerking terror at the thought that her youngest, Milly (Mandy Moore), will never follow in her sisters' footsteps and marry a suitable man. Instead, Daphne worries, Milly will end up just like her - alone, wearing ill-advised belted ensembles and talking frankly to a Labrador Retriever.
No matter if Milly hasn't hit 25 yet; the race is on, and it involves an ad on an internet dating site placed by Daphne, a list of candidates vetted by Daphne, and a struggle between a rich-but-mean guy (Tom Everett Scott) and a poor-but-kind guy (Gabriel Macht). Daphne also discovers orgasms with the poor-but-kind guy's father (Stephen Collins). What a jape!
Except, of course, it's not. Because I Said So is romcom-by-numbers, and it wears its calculating, cliche-guzzling impatience to cash in on that market all over its polka-dot sleeve. The various male characters are mere placeholders, the supporting female characters spend their time boisterously shoe-shopping, cake-baking or furniture-rearranging. And even when Keaton's character loses her voice, her performance emits a nerve-scraping, high-pitched squeal.
Don't believe me? Look closely at the dog reaction shots; they'll tell you. There are certainly enough of them.
