This is a film that is not as good as I remember, a disturbing film where the three children of Jack Lemmon and Olympia caucus decide to separate them when the father becomes ill while the mother is recovering from a heart attack. It's not like the situation in the 1937 tear-jerker Make Way for Tomorrow" where family finances Force The matriarch and patriarch of the family to spend the remainder of their lives separated from each other. And that film, they agreed that in spite of how much they did not want to be separated that it was the best thing to do and have one last reunion before they would go their own way for good. In this film, mother and father are certainly able to afford some sort of in-home care but the children (Ted Danson, Kathy Baker and Kevin Spacey) physically force them to be separated.
Then there's Ethan Hawke as the neglected grandson of Danson's who comes for a visit and is basically treated like none of his feelings matter. When Danson tells him off that he shouldn't even be there, that he's just in the way, it would be the perfect opportunity for hawk to simply say then I'm disowning myself from this family. Great performances by Lemmon and Dukakis (playing older than their years) are the highlights, but the film's efforts to be sentimental and show the adult children as being in the right left me very cold towards them. My initial rating from seeing this when it first came out was seven out of 10, but I certainly don't feel the same way about it 30 something years later.
Then there's Ethan Hawke as the neglected grandson of Danson's who comes for a visit and is basically treated like none of his feelings matter. When Danson tells him off that he shouldn't even be there, that he's just in the way, it would be the perfect opportunity for hawk to simply say then I'm disowning myself from this family. Great performances by Lemmon and Dukakis (playing older than their years) are the highlights, but the film's efforts to be sentimental and show the adult children as being in the right left me very cold towards them. My initial rating from seeing this when it first came out was seven out of 10, but I certainly don't feel the same way about it 30 something years later.