Kevin Kline plays the stereotypical Californian, a man lucky enough to work in his chosen field, architecture, yet hate his job for 20 years. When he's finally fired - since computer models have replaced his 3-D model-building skills - he's presumably 45, really p'o'd, and diagnosed with cancer to boot. He looks closer to 55, but let's not quibble, it's necessary for the acting-sick-aging-rapidly part of the film, where his 3/4'' stubble stays exactly the same salt-n-pepper length throughout. (There's an art in doing that, as they know in Italy!) His ex-wife plays the perfect Californian divorcee, the role of unemployed, remarried, unhappy, loose-end-floating, what-is-life-about-anyway Central European blondie type. Kline shows up to let her know that he, too, is now unemployed, but luckily getting one year's severance pay, since he never remarried to any mealticket. He will now take that money and use it to knock down an old shack, inherited from his father, on the side of a cliff in Southern California. It's truly a wonderful, old, weatherbeaten wooden house, stuck in the middle of an upper-class-white-bread neighborhood which had risen up around it since the 1980's.

Kline is there, indeed, not only to inform her of his plans - omitting the death knolls chiming soon - but to pick up his 16-year-old lout of a son, with Gothic black hair, eye makeup, pierced lobes and nose and an attitude that stinks worse than Taliban left rotting in a cave. His adopted father has refused to deal with him - save the billpaying - while his mother sits on the top of the stairs and sighs. He's taking drugs and experimenting with gay sex, even to the point of earning money with it on the submissive end. Am I naive, or do these types really predominate? Even in whacko San Francisco, I don't see too many this far gone kids. Maybe they're out in the suburbs, snorting and gloryholing. Ah yes, I forgot, we have a lot of Asians, whose parents give a springroll and know how to enforce their will, instead of the other way around. Whoops, never mind, no fair comparison to priviledged, bored white youth!

Kline is pessimistic, and living poor indeed, in fact, now he'll be in the garage during this project. He wants his son with him for his final earthly months, and to straighten him out by giving him real work, manly hard stuff. Surprise! All the cliffside crowbarring and plank-banging straightens out this gay-leaning Gothic boy, who even removes his piercings and puts on a baseball cap! The nympho girl next door, whose equally nympho bone-thin mother lets the boy use the shower, joins him now and then in a "friendly shower", just to prove to him that he's not quite gay.

Yes, and the mother of the girl is consorting with this boy's best high school friend! How's that for fun, fun, fun?

As the project goes along, the ex-wife keeps appearing in her BMW monster SUV, along with her two small stepsons, and more and more of the neighborhood is being pulled into this project. She and Kline resume their love, which he claims he never lost. One can only speculate that she left him because he was a moody, difficult and unhappy failure, who never had been able to fix up the old house while they were young, just married, living in it together. The equally moody son begins to understand that he was born in the old house, that his parents had been in love then, and that he is a product of a real heterosexual marriage, lo and behold! This helps him get over his gay inclinations, as well, or so we should believe. Such a revelation might help the gays of San Francisco?

Kline's stomach pains increase dramatically, in spite of strong painkillers. Finally his family demands to know just how bad his backache really is, so the truth must out. When they all understand the gravity of Kline's situation, like magic, their cranky discontent starts melding into cooperation, good behavior, yes, even love.

In addition to this soppy plot, there's plodding fake-sentimental music mixed with the crashing beach scenes. The topper to it all is the son's sudden decision to give away the completed house to a woman, disabled in a wheelchair, hit by Kline's drunken father when she was a small girl. So the circle of guilt and malfunction, drugs and drinking, promiscuity and gay-leaning, will now come to a happy closure for us all.

What a viewer from any other culture might start to wonder is: how on earth is such a life possible? Where do these people get all the time and money, how can they care for their own families so little, until there's cancer or drugs, how can education and future-planning be so neglected for the young? WHy do none of the teenagers ever discuss their dreams, ambitions, or job-seeking efforts? Why do they all seem to live only in the moment and float on a ready-made mattress of money, with no elders at all concerned what happens to them, even to let them sleep around at random? Why does Kline's ex-wife remarry, yet tally with Kline every day, caring nothing for the second husband, and then act sleepy-dopey in reaction to his departure? Doesn't she wonder who's gonna pay for her SUV?

This film could have been made in Sweden, for all the true feelings shown in these characters' lives or life choices. Does anyone have a heart or soul, or smidgen of morality left in their gray matter?

If you want to know how to destroy your soul, or your family's soul, through years of neglect and indifference, but then do a crash-job slap-dab bandaid surgery on it - well, this is the movie for you. But may we recommend that you don't go the Southern Californian me-me-me route in the first place, so that you won't have to wait until cancer strikes to make amends? Was this meant as a medieval morality play, to show sinners repenting, expiating their sins, asking forgiveness, reflecting on their evil? For me, all this left a bad taste in my mouth: all was pointless.

Remember, for all we know, hell MAY exist. Even on earth. Ask Pascal.



Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age