No, but perhaps his crazy uncles are. The dreamy, disheveled Uncle Arthur (Maury Chaykin) is an obsessive pack rat, filling the apartment he shares with his brother Danny with rubber balls, old newspapers, paper clips-objects he believes are invested with the soul of the city. Uncle Danny (Michael Richards) looks at the big picture-and sees conspiracies everywhere. A raving paranoid, he’s convinced that Idaho is the Cherokee word for Jew-hater, and I Like Ike" a code for “I hate kikes.”
The rock at the center of Steven’s life is his loving mother, Selma (Andie MacDowell). But suddenly her high spirit fades. Stricken with cancer, she withdraws to her bed. Unable to deal with the possibility of her death, Steven flees his suburban home to take refuge in the bizarre but, to him, utterly magical world of his two daft uncles.
The material, based on a memoir by author Franz Lidz, could easily have turned insufferably whimsical. But Keaton and her gifted screenwriter Richard LaGravenese (“The Bridges of Madison County,” “A Little Princess”) have fashion a disarming gem, a movie as peculiarly funny as it is heart-breaking. It’s one of those films in which everyone seems tuned to the same wavelength, producing fresh and buoyant work. Andie MacDowell as a Jewish mother? It sounds wrong, yet she’s never been so touching. Watt is effortlessly endearing. Chaykin and Roberts play off each other like a crackerjack–and cracked–vaudeville team. Only one scene strikes a false note: the pat resolution of Uncle Danny’s delusions, set at a sanitarium so tastefully appointed you’d want to check in tomorrow.
Thanks to everyone involved, the movie radiates a hundred pleasures: from LaGravanese’s perfect ear for the elocutions of a grammar-school election speech to the surprising orchestrations of Thomas Newman’s score to the burnished glow of the cinematography. But the guiding spirit is clearly Keaton’s, whose touch is both delicate and assured. You can detect her sensibility in every detail, from the California swap-meet style of interior decoration to her understanding of the outsider Steven’s struggle to find his place in the world. He triumphs, as Keaton has in her varied career, not by blending in but by letting his true, eccentric soul blossom.
