MOVIE REVIEW : ‘The Cemetery Club’: Buried in Sentiment

The three recently widowed women in “The Cemetery Club” (at Pacific’s Crest and AMC Century 14) visit their husbands’ gravestones as a trio. They go as an outing; their clubishness reinforces their shared solitude. Esther Moskowitz (Ellen Burstyn) is the most judicious and becalmed of the trio; her beauty still has its bloom. Doris Silverman (Olympia Dukakis) is an inveterate complainer; Lucille Rubin (Diane Ladd) is perpetually randy.

We’re supposed to view these ladies as a kind of tripartite Everywoman--or at least Everywidow. Although much is made of their Jewishness, the film’s aim is to “universalize” their plight. They kvetch for a higher cause.

Based on the play by Ivan Menchell and directed by Bill Duke, “The Cemetery Club,” set in Pittsburgh, is shamelessly upfront about the ways it attacks our tear ducts. Occasionally, as with the cameos by Lainie Kazan as an oft-married free spirit, and Wallace Shawn as a wedding director, the results are giddy fun. But the sitcom high jinks and the socko sentimentality wear you out because there’s little behind it except winks and winsomeness.

Doris and Lucille, in particular, are portrayed as one-note caricatures. Their confabs are exhaustingly predictable because they keep hitting the same keys. Part of the problem is the way the roles have been written: These are “types,” not characters. The actresses have been encouraged to play out their miseries so broadly that they might as well be traipsing through an opera bouffe. Ladd had a lyrical loopiness in “Rambling Rose” but there’s no lyricism in Lucille’s ding-bat longingness here. And it may be time for Dukakis to give that tough-tender wised-up act of hers a rest. Her performances have become generic.

Burstyn, who has rarely made it into the movies in the past decade, provides a calm center for the film’s shenanigans, but she’s lovely without ever being terribly interesting. She plays up her vulnerability in ways that at times are moving and at times unseemly. (Esther is so vulnerable that she seems diaphanous--without a solid bone in her body.) Her romance with Danny Aiello’s Ben Katz, a widower who married rather late in life, has a few tentative moments of real feeling, although it’s solidly in the early Paddy Chayefsky/”Marty” mode. This “little people” approach is supposed to be humanistic but sometimes comes across as condescending instead. All this sentimental diminution doesn’t allow for the exaltation in people’s lives.

“The Cemetery Club” (rated PG-13 for sensuality and language) is another in a line of middle-age second-chance-at-love scenarios. “Moonstruck,” by far the best of breed, led the way, but lately we had “Used People” and now this. They’re more like “Moonstruck Out.” Like “Used People,” “The Cemetery Club” uses knockabout farce as a weapon; we’re supposed to recognize that these people are hurting inside. But do these people really have insides? The pathos they are made to go through is a form of shtick; so is the heavy ethnic stereotyping.

There have been some rumblings that, since “The Cemetery Club” is about a frankly Jewish community, it’s odd that no Jewish actors are among the four principal leads. There are plenty of things wrong with this movie but the question of ethnicity is not--should not be--one of them. It would be a shame if critics decided that only Jews should plays Jews in the movies. Isn’t it difficult enough to give a good performance without bringing in religion? Besides, isn’t the whole point of acting to become something you are not? For an actor, believability is the only valid criterion.

‘The Cemetery Club’

Ellen Burstyn: Esther Moskowitz

Olympia Dukakis: Doris Silverman

Diane Ladd: Lucille Rubin

Danny Aiello: Ben Katz

Touchstone Pictures presentation of a David Brown, Sophie Hurst and Bonnie Palef production. Director Bill Duke. Producers Brown, Hurst and Palef. Screenplay by Ivan Menchell. Cinematographer Steven Poster. Editor John Carter. Costumes Hilary Rosenfeld. Music Elmer Bernstein. Production design Maher Ahmad. Art director Nicklas Farrantello. Set designer Michael Hanley. Set decorator Gene Serdena. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13 (sensuality and language).