Movie Review by Susan Hodgetts
Starring: Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Feuerstein
Director: Curtis Hanson
This warm and funny chick flick will strike at the hearts of girls with sisters everywhere, and is ideal fluffy pyjama and Haagen Daas material.
Cameron Diaz plays Maggie Feller, a self-centred, immature layabout who doesn’t have the confidence in her abilities to keep a job. The only thing she knows how to do well is attract men and help herself to money from other people. Neither of which are particularly good job, or sister keeping, qualities.
Toni Collette plays her sister Rose. The complete opposite of Maggie, she’s an uptight lawyer with plenty of money but zero confidence in her appearance and personality.
The sisters lost their bi-polar depressive mother to a car crash when they were small, and when Maggie and Rose have a huge bust-up, Maggie discovers a stack of letters from the girls’ maternal grandmother in the family home that her father has been hiding for years. Initially for ulterior motives, she goes to visit granny, who’s working in a retirement village in Florida, and ends up with a whole re-education she could never have thought possible. Meanwhile Rose also has lessons of her own she must learn before the sisters can reconcile, whilst granny must reconcile herself with her past.
Gradually, the family pieces itself back together as the girls learn about their family and each other, and begin to fill the gap left by their deceased mother.
This is funny, warm, beautifully scripted, and Shirley MacLaine is a gem. As palatable as that tub of Haagen Daas.
