MOVIE REVIEWS : Sentimentality Tears ‘Staying Together’ Apart

The small-town atmosphere in “Staying Together,” set in Ridgeway, S.C., is humid with metaphorical meaning. The streets are a bit too quaint; the homes too ramshackle; the people too countrified and ornery. If you think you’ve seen it all before--well, you have. And that’s the point. The movie (citywide) is englobed in the sentimentality of a hundred rural coming-of age dramas, and the familiarity breeds not contempt but boredom.

Monte Merrick’s script, directed by Lee Grant, is crammed with little life lessons about the value of family. The McDermott clan takes center stage. (The stage reference is intentional. This is the sort of overliterary script where you can practically hear the commas in the dialogue.) Brian (Tim Quill), the oldest of the three rambunctious McDermott boys, is having an affair with an ambitious mayoral candidate (Stockard Channing). Kit (Dermot Mulroney) is dallying with a woman (Daphne Zuniga) engaged to be married. The youngest, Duncan (Sean Astin), is the family wiseacre. He leaves no quip unturned.

Until their father (Jim Haynie) decides to sell it, all three boys work at the family restaurant, McDermott’s Family Chicken. Dad is considerate with his family, but he is also remote, walled-in. He is hidebound by his distaste for playing the role of provider. Mom (Melinda Dillon) looks after her men with the aplomb of a woman who has learned how to anticipate her broods’ vagaries. She is woozy with maternal understanding.

“Staying Together” is saddled with a generic-sounding title, but it doesn’t misrepresent the movie’s dull, cloned sameness. Every scene carries its own echo chamber of prior references. If Lee Grant were a better director, the film might have been more accomplished, perhaps: something along the lines of “Stand By Me,” with its heightened, boys’ book tableaux. She is a clunky visualist, though; the camera always seems to be wobbling about in search of its subject. To overcompensate, she lets the actors go hog-wild, but the effect is bizarre, as if “Ozzie and Harriet” had suddenly gone Method.

Actors-turned-directors often go in for this sort of hyper-indulgence, but the dramatics in “Staying Together” don’t have the ballast to support all that ridiculous emoting. The hurts of parenthood and the hesitancies of young love ought to have more emotional sting than they receive in this movie. You don’t want to embrace these people. You want to give them noogies.

If you feel like you haven’t really been to the movies after you come out of “Staying Together,” that’s probably because it has the paper-thin texture of a made-for-TV production. None of the characters in this coming-of-age drama really age; they simply pass through one event after another until the final, heartwarming wrap-up. But even if the drama had more heft, it’s probably too late for audiences to accept the film makers’ sugared view of small-town distress. (David Lynch may have killed it for good.) In the movies, we’ve moved on to other sentimentalities. As, for example, the current fave: the joys of having a baby, and of being a baby, too. The old-fashionedness of “Staying Together” is unbecoming.

The film makers proffer their banalities before us like trophies. They offer a counterfeit view of small-town life as the one and only all-American mother lode. They push the wisdom that, yes, big souls can reside in small places. Except in the noggins of small-minded dramatists, can this really be news to anyone?

‘STAYING TOGETHER’

A Hemdale release. Executive producers John Daly, Derek Gibson. Producer Joseph Feury. Co-producer Milton Justice. Director Lee Grant. Screenplay Monte Merrick. Camera Dick Bush. Music Miles Goodman. Production designer Stuart Wurtzel. Costumes Carol Oditz. Film editor Katherine Wenning. With Sean Astin, Stockard Channing, Melinda Dillon, Jim Haynie, Levon Helm, Dinah Manoff, Dermot Mulroney, Tim Quill.

Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (younger than 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).