Marvin's Room

A somewhat willowy melodrama that managed to attract an all-star cast, this is a very 90s story (with that gorgeously soft 90s-drama look) about estranged sisters and responsibility. Marvin's Room was based on a play (it kind of shows) and features Diane Keaton in an Oscar-nominated role as Bessie - a terminally ill, self-sacrificing spinster who looks after her dementia-afflicted father, Marvin (Hume Cronyn).

When Bessie is informed by her doctor, Dr. Wally (Robert De Niro), that she has leukemia she decides to get in contact with her estranged sister, Lee (Meryl Streep), in the hope of finding a bone marrow match. With this compassionate reason in mind, Lee is able to get her delinquent son Hank (Leonardo DiCaprio) out of the mental hospital for long enough to visit her sister. Hank is surprised to find that his long-lost aunt couldn't be less like his mother, but he still resists taking the test to determine if he is a suitable doner. The rift between the family will have to be healed metaphorically befeore any physical healing can be done.

Streep is entertaining as the selfish, gumchewing hairdresser... she's always with a cigarette in her mouth and sometimes borders on outright white trash, but Streep imbues the character with enough dimension to get past Lee's superficiality to establish some level of sympathy with the audience. DiCaprio continues the promise of his earliest performances (What's Eating Gilbert Grape, This Boy's Life) with a realistically caustic teenage characterisation. Keaton is okay, her acting sometimes seems too overly contrived towards eliciting pity, but she works well with Streep and DiCaprio despite this. De Niro's character (a mild, genial doctor) seems rather colourless and flat amongst all the histrionics... maybe that's intentional, but then again it's possibly just laziness on his part as Marvin's Room comes right at the beginning of a ten year stretch in his career where he would give a series of mostly uninspired performances.

As I mentioned, you can kind of tell that this is based on a play. It features three strong central characters (Lee, Bessie and Hank) who fight and reconcile with one another relentlessly throughout the film, and little else happens. Bessie is a woman who has given up her life to look after her infirm father, whereas Lee is entirely self-motivated and unwilling to accept responsibility. Hank nurses longstanding emotional wounds as a result of the distance between himself and his single mother, and frequently tests the boundaries of their relationship. The material isn't anything particularly new or exciting, but the leads are more than talented enough to make it at least marginally interesting. I can't say it's an amazing film, it's a bit too deliberately weepy for my tastes, but the performances are worth watching.

TRIVIA: This was Hume Cronyn's last film. Although the film is named after his character, he doesn't speak any lines as his character has a pretty bad case of dementia. Cronyn continued to act for another five years, but only on television.