Stop me if you've heard this one:
There's this lovably quirky family living in the Southwest, and even though they bicker all the time, they really do love one another. So much so, in fact, that when one of them finds an unexpected route to possible success in life, the whole family piles into the creaky old van to support her. There's a talented cast of actors who are comfortable on both sides of the indie/studio divide, and look! There's Alan Arkin as the curmudgeonly patriarch who teaches life lessons -- most of them inappropriate -- to his adorable moppet of a grandchild. And a suicidal family member plays a key role in the action.
No, it's not Little Miss Sunshine, but it comes as close to it in style and tone as humanly possible. Unfortunately, it fails to tell an interesting story and leaves its talented cast stranded with nothing to do.
Emily Blunt and Amy Adams star as sisters who go into business together running a crime-scene cleanup service; Arkin is their father, who has a not very successful career as a distributor of giant metal tins of popcorn. And absolutely nothing of interest happens to any of them.
Oh, Adams has an affair with a local cop (Steve Zahn) and a sort of romantic fling with the guy who sells cleaning supplies (Clifton Collins, Jr.), and there's a strange subplot involving Blunt and the daughter (Mary Lynn Rajskub) of one of the dead women they're cleaning up after, in which it's never clear whether their relationship is supposed to be friendly, adversarial, or romantic.
But none of it works, and most of it is just annoying. It's a festival of quirk for quirk's sake. Not recommended.
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