MOVIE REVIEW : The Actors Shine in ‘An Unremarkable Life’

“An Unremarkable Life” (AMC Century 14) gives us three remarkable actors--Patricia Neal, Shelley Winters and Mako--in a laudable but far-too-frail effort to revive the once-flourishing tradition of the small-town psychological family drama.

This film--about two sisters knotted together in the emotionally airless cul de sac of their family home--suggests Tennessee Wiliams, William Inge or, even more, their innumerable imitators. And like those ‘50s and ‘60s copycats, writer Marcia Dinneen and director-producer Amin Q. Chaudhri (“Tiger Warsaw”) move the Freudian lyricism and family trauma of their models toward something coyer, more manageable.

It’s a little chamber drama about repression. The lighting is flutey-soft. The house is a tunnel of brown corridors and oppressively neat upholstery. Within it, longtime spinster Frances McEllany (Neal) lives with her widowed sister Evelyn (Winters). Frances, whose lover died in World War II, is still a romantic, and, when she is wooed by the delightfully flirty Max Chin (Mako), a local garage worker interned during the war, her face beams with reawakened charm. Evelyn, on the other hand, hated her marriage, welcomes her imprisonment and wants to make sure Frances won’t get away either--tying her down in an endless cycle of family dinners, TV shows and weekend movies. When Max cruises in, she treats him as a cross between a slob fortune hunter and a potential Fu Manchu.

This is the kind of weepy, kvetching bully role Winters loves to play, and she catches the character’s racism and psychological terrorism. Then, masterfully, she turns us around in the last scene: makes us feel the woman’s vulnerability and fear.

The excellent Neal is almost as good as Frances, though--heavy with long-suffering smiles--it becomes the more conventional of the two roles. And Mako could hardy be better as Max Chin. He gives the character dignity and a risque impishness, suggesting the layers of a wounded but resilient man who’s made many compromises to survive and can calibrate the exact moments when lines must be drawn. These three actors supply most of “Life’s” intelligence and quality. Yet, in watching them, you often feel the film makers should have gone with less obvious casting and had Winters and Neal switch parts. Going against type, Winters might have gotten something more pathetic and surprising; Neal might have been scarier and more tragic.

Chaudhri is perhaps too discreet, too respectful. This thin, unexceptional, obvious material needs more juice, more dramatic and visual resonance. There’s even something awry about the time frame. In the opening scene, Evelyn is leading Frances in the Charleston--though both sisters were probably born about the time people were actually dancing it.

Perhaps Dinneen is simply remembering her ‘50s models--when sisters this age actually would have been recalling the Charleston. There’s an occupational hazard of the Inge-Williams tradition that these film makers fall into: Just as their antagonists get self-righteous about sexual proprieties, they get self-righteous about sexual liberation.

That’s what happens here; there’s something almost callously happy about the resolution. The title of “An Unremarkable Life” (MPAA rated PG, despite sexual badinage) suggests that we’re going to see the kind of luminous everyday parable that the late Italian scenarist Cesare Zavattini (“Umberto D”) wrote so wonderfully. Instead, we get a mostly unremarkable pastiche--in which three fine actors manage, occasionally, to shine.

‘AN UNREMARKABLE LIFE’

An SVS Films Presentation of a Continental Film Group Ltd. Production. Producer/Director Amin Q. Chaudhri. Script Marcia Dinneen. Camera Alan Hall. Music Avery Sharpe. Editor Sandi Gerling. Production Design Norman B. Dodge Jr. Costume Design Carol Helen Beule. Associate Producer Brian Smedley-Aston. With Patricia Neal, Shelley Winters, Mako, Rochelle Oliver, Charles Dutton, Lisa Hsieh.

Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG (parental guidance suggested; some material may not be suitable for children).