Home Fries

From its opening minutes, you might suspect that Home Fries will be a folksy girl-appeal comedy drama, following plucky unwed mother-to-be and fast food drive-up clerk Sally (Drew Barrymore) on her search for independence and true love through the world of greasy dining--sort of a Home Fried Green Tomatoes, if you will. Be prepared to dismiss such notions in short order, as black helicopters and parricidal families take over this darkly comic concoction from a script by X-Files veteran Vince Gilligan. Home Fries' brand of quirky humor could quickly become oppressive without sure-handed direction, but Dean Parisot seems to know just how to drop the peculiar into a scene without pointing at it for you and slapping your knee. It's all consistently off-beat in a way that's refreshing more often than just plain weird, tempered by an undercurrent of sweet sincerity in the budding romance between Barrymore and Luke Wilson (as Dorian, a man who may or may not be on a mission to kill her). It's too bad that the film wraps up with an overwrought helicopter-car chase that feels ridiculously out of place, and that Barrymore can't make her character as interesting as the oddball supporting cast around her. In fact, Sally ultimately takes a back seat to Dorian's search for affection outside a dysfunctional family where mom sheds crocodile tears at her husbands funeral and big brother pumps carbon monoxide into the trailer of an unsuspecting woman. Not exactly the stuff of girl-appeal comedy-drama, but bracing entertainment nonetheless. Recommended. (S. Renshaw)