DVD: A Boring, Caustic Family

The Sisters (1.5/5 stars)

This is the story (despite the title) of four siblings (Mary Stuart Masterson, Maria Bello, Erika Christensen, and Alessandro Nivola) and their spouses and friends (Elizabeth Banks, Steven Culp, Tony Goldwyn, Eric McCormack, Chris O'Donnell, Rip Torn) who all live around or work at an unnamed university. You can easily tell that this story comes from a play, because the film is extremely dialogue heavy and almost entirely takes place in one room of a library at the college where many of the characters are professors.

The story opens with the friends and family planning a surprise party for the youngest sibling (Christensen), and moves from that to the drama of an accident that follows the party followed by a brief montage to let us know that some time has passed, finally concluding at another party at the same library for a baby shower for the wife of the brother (Nivola). Introduced are some preditable love trianges and deep-seeded issues between the family and friends to add much melodrama.

The plot does not serve much purpose but for a setting for the principal characters to showcase how they are very caustic and mean, and the story basically revolves around them acting unreasonably cruel to each other over the smallest contrivances. Along the way it is revealed that the more despicable a character is, the larger current or childhood trauma is that lies behind it and explains it.

This sort of thing sometimes works (Closer comes to mind), but here it does not. The acting is mostly horrendous (with the exception of Bello, and even then only at certain times), and the dialogue is filled with cliche ridden pseudo-intellectual babble of the sort that nobody in real life would ever say to each other. Thus, what could be the film's strength serves as the main weakness and the whole thing turns into a basically pointless exercise. This is something you can probably skip out on.