Stepmom

About forty minutes into Stepmom, I came to two numbing realizations: I knew exactly where this domestic drama was headed, and I still had 90 minutes of the inevitable ahead of me. There's some potential in the premise of a divorced mother (Susan Sarandon) dealing both with cancer and her fear of being replaced by her husband's new girlfriend (Julia Roberts), but the multi-attributed script for Stepmom may be the most inefficient piece of screen writing in recent memory. This narrative unwieldiness makes it hard to connect with any of the many plot threads winding through the film, and leaves poor Ed Harris (as the father and fulcrum of the piece) a complete enigma. Of course it's understood that Stepmom is meant as a showcase for its two lead actresses, a showcase we shouldn't begrudge performers as reliable as Sarandon and Roberts. Both are actually quite good, but they're stuck in the kind of film which has become director Chris Columbus's trademark: cheap comic relief which gives way to Big Messages of understanding. It's an emotional mess of a movie which grows more irritating with each subsequent karaoke performance and redundant confrontation. Good actors deserve better than a script that looks like the work of five writers slapped together with masking tape. Not recommended. (S. Renshaw)