The Other Sister

Director: Garry Marshall
Cast:
Juliette Lewis
Diane Keaton
Tom Skerritt
Giovanni Ribisi
Poppy Montgomery
Genre: Drama

There's no way around the fact that this entire movie is based on two characters who are...differently abled. We used to call kids "retarded" back in the shallow '70s, but that term became so pejorative on the bus ride home that it has all but vanished from the lexicon. I suppose the right phrase is "learning disabled," but being PC always takes more syllables than I like. I suppose I'll have to get used to it.

Either way, Juliette Lewis plays a girl who was such a social misfit that her parents (lovingly rendered by a sweet Tom Skerritt and a pugnacious Diane Keaton) sent her away to school. She returns, finally, as a relatively well-adapted (but still disabled) adult, who yearns to break free of her mom's protective shell and fall in love. Fortunately, there's someone else just as disabled at the local community college: Giovanni Ribisi, who has battled every social ill to become a baker and a student. For a while, their love affair seems a little too convenient: it verges on the "sickeningly cute" side, and it's hard to shake the feeling that these two actors, in saliva-drenched stutters, are two of Hollywood's hottest young stars being paid an inordinate amount of money to be retarded. But as the movie presses on, there is also a sense of palpable doom that encompasses the couple, and you genuinely want them to succeed. Some of the jokes are obvious, but the movie does a pretty good job of having fun with the two leads without MAKING fun of them; an almost impossible tightrope to walk.

Diane Keaton is back as a Woody Allen WASPy character whose whiteness seems to pervade every mannerism; I've seen garden club meetings with the same nervous titterers, tut-tutting over towels on wet furniture and dessert cakes. But the movie's heart lies in Juliette Lewis, who is plainly talented enough to do anything she wants. Whether or not you like her as a retarded teen is entirely up to you, but her dynamic with Ribisi, who is slightly less well-adjusted, gradually wins you over. I cried at the end like a slobbering fool, but maybe I'm just having an emotional month.

—Ian Williams

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