We tried fairly hard to enjoy this movie, but it was ultimately a disappointing way to spend an evening, and turned into a bit of a trial just to get through. We had no preconceptions, having made a fairly spontaneous decision to watch it based on the interesting premise of the story outline alone. To its credit it was mostly unpredictable and failed to fall conveniently into a genre, but that was also part of its undoing. By about a third of the way through the lack of clear genre slowly became lack of clear direction, and motivations of characters (and plot) became implausible and unbelievable. Surprisingly, while the acting was generally fine, Kevin Kline's portrayal of his character became grating and over-acted. By about half way the movie had become completely obsessed in a Woody Allen way with personal introspection and psycho-therapeutic evaluation of parent/child relationships, which left us not caring any longer what happened to any of the increasingly unlikable characters, and looking at our watches. All of this might have been tolerable if the movie was in any way entertaining or thought provoking. It wasn't, and the only real emotional response we registered was cringing a few times. Overall, it just fell flat.
Review of My Old Lady
