Tripping over its own good intentions, Tiptoes is a comedic drama in which the relationship between a handsome firefighter (Matthew McConaughey) and his pregnant painter fiancée (Kate Beckinsale) may be derailed by the belated revelation that dwarfism runs in his family (in fact, he's the only one over four feet tall). But when Beckinsale takes all this in stride and it's McConaughey who seems unnerved by the possible implications for their child, the film is exposed as a patronizing anti-discrimination parable, full of simplistically pat-on-the-head dialogue like, "But that's what life is all about--dealing with hardship. If a person can't deal with that, they can't ever be happy." Writer Bill Weiner and director Matthew Bright (who apparently lost his sense of irony sometime after the terrifically trashy 1996 indie Freeway) seem so determined to depict the normalcy of this family's life (pausing occasionally for frank acknowledgement of inherent medical problems) that by default the story's most interesting characters are its peripheral eccentrics: Gary Oldman as McConaughey's stunted, melancholy twin brother (he's made to look smaller with seamless force-perspective camera techniques), and Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent) as an angry, French rebel-Marxist dwarf with a normal-sized, spaced-out hippie girlfriend (Patricia Arquette). Not a necessary purchase. (R. Blackwelder)
Tiptoes
Columbia TriStar, 91 min., R, VHS: $90.99, DVD: $24.98 Volume 19, Issue 5
Tiptoes
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