Happy Tears

This comedy-drama written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein tells the tale of two sisters called on to care for their declining father. Jayne (Parker Posey) is the shopaholic wife of a well-to-do but troubled California painter. She reluctantly returns to her childhood home in Pittsburgh at the insistence of her older sister, Laura (Demi Moore), to take her turn looking after their deteriorating widower dad Joe (Rip Torn). The rambunctious, cantankerous patriarch can no longer manage on his own, so he's taken in Shelly (Ellen Barkin), a so-called nurse whose real profession is undoubtedly something else. What follows is a messy combination of teary melodrama and rowdy farce, sometimes uncomfortably overlapping (on the one hand, the two siblings mourn their dead mother; on the other, there's slapstick involving a treasure the old man supposedly buried in the backyard, with the women renting an earth-mover to find it). The fine cast sinks in the morass, with Posey indulging in her repertoire of tics and quirks and Torn going full-bore in his portrayal of an aging rascal with dementia, while Moore is simply dour. But Happy Tears' central problems definitely lie with Lichtenstein's (son of acclaimed late painter Roy) weak script and uneven direction. Not recommended. (F. Swietek)