"Marvin's Room"
                             A Film Review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                          WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL
                               March 1, 1997

      "Marvin's Room" opened in Tampa yesterday and it has much to recommend
it, particularly the fine ensemble acting by an outstanding group of stars:
Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Leonardo di Caprio, Robert Di Niro, Gwen Verdon,
and Hume Croynin. It boggles the mind to think of what the combined Oscar/Tony
count of that cast must be. And none of them turns in a disappointing
performance here. Keaton has been nominated for an Academy Award for her
performace as Bessie, the stay-at-home-caring-for-aged-relatives sister
(although I thought that Meryl Streep's less showy but perfectly rendered
performance of the other sister, the one who got away from that family twenty
years before is the more fully realized one).

      Still I found the film problematic. The subject matter is grim--illness,
death, and dying--and the playwright turned screenwriter, Scott McPherson,
seems so intent upon making this material into a comedy that he presses way
too hard, turning some of the characters such as Aunt Ruth (Verdon) and Dr.
Wally (Di Niro) into near buffoons and adding others, such as the Dr.'s
brother, for no good reason except to sneak a few more comedic turns in).
Certainly, it's an important point that in circumstances where death and
illness are the dominant realities, humor is not only often very much present,
but very necessary. But here, it is strained for rather than something the
arises from the situations and that's a bit disturbing.

     Also disturbing to me was the degree to which this film tried to
manipulate the audience into its pro-family point of view. Bessie, the
spinster sister who stayed home and took care of her elcerly relatives for
twenty years and who now is faced with leukemia herself, is painted as the
sister who has had the good, full life because it gave her the opportunity to
love and be loved. Lee, who ran off into an unhappy marriage with an abusive
man, who has raised two sons alone (though she's too self absorbed to do
anything but a miserable job of it) and who is now finally getting her life
together, graduating from cosmetology school and looking forward to achieving
some of her own goals and dreams is portrayed as selfish and unhappy. That
this is true for these particular characters is a given, but there is the
nagging, unspoken, underlying suggestion that this is a more general truth.
That breaking with your disfunctional family and trying to find your own way,
pursue your own dreams, is always the wrong course to follow and that staying
home and devoting your life to care and nurturing of others is the road to
happiness and fulfilment--these are problematic assumptions for feminists that
need to be taken with a huge grain of salt. They sound profoundly conservative
and regressive. And I say this even while personally having experienced over
recent months how rewarding it can be to care for an ill and elderly parent
from whom one was once estranged. Just because it can be so doesn't mean that
it is necessarily so--and I wish the film made that point, as well.

     One thing I liked about the screenplay was the fact that it did not give
us the stock Hollywood happy ending that it might have, i.e., finding that one
of the long lost relatives was the genetic match that would provide Bessie
with the bone marrow transplant that would save her life. Not everybody was
pleased with this. At the screening I attended, there was a sizeable group of
teenagers present merely because their heart throb Leonardo Di Caprio was in
the film. At the end they let out a collective howl of outrage that the film
was over without the requisite "happy ending" and one remarked, you mean it's
just going to end and they're all just going to die? I don't suppose it would
have done any good to point out to them that that's how life actually is--it
doesn't always get tied up into a nice bow with all the loose ends tucked
neatly in. The film is not without its sense of resolution, however, namely
the sense that the boys and their mother, Lee, are, at long last, going to
experience the joys of living in the bosom of their own family. That's the
Hollywood feel good fantasy ending that the teenagers apparently failed to
respond to. And maybe they were right to let that one pass right by; in real
life people don't have complete personality changes overnight, so why should
we believe that Lee and her sons would either.

      My recommendation is: go see this one for the acting, but don't let your
feminist guard down and be taken in by the essentially traditional ideology of
women's lives the film seems to be peddling. For the WMNF Women's Show, this
is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film.