COMMENTARY : Hollywood Hankers for Family : In the Age of Gump, films about families are proliferating. But the movies are only big-screen sitcoms.

Is it just my imagination or did more movie stars and film magnates tote and tout their families--their spouses, parents and kids--at the Academy Awards this year? The celebrity pages in the magazines and newspapers are starting to look like family photo albums. Even Clint Eastwood has been caught by the paparazzi squiring his mom. Has it become the latest in Hollywood cool to show off your family-ness?

Just look to the movies. After years of being scorched by the family values dragons, Hollywood in the Age of Gump has reacted by going family mad. From “Stuart Saves His Family” to “My Family” and “The Perez Family,” from “The Brady Bunch Movie” and “Miami Rhapsody” to “Bye Bye, Love” and “While You Were Sleeping,” with side excursions to “Losing Isaiah” and “Dolores Claiborne” and a nod to “Legends of the Fall” and “Tommy Boy,” Hollywood has been floating the back-to-basics notion that families are where it’s at.

Of course, this being the ‘90s, many of these movies have had to nuke the nuclear family in order to reassemble the pieces. The central joke of films like “Miami Rhapsody” and “Stuart Saves His Family”--whatever their slim merits as movies--is that the only functional families now are the dysfunctional ones. It’s no use trying to live up to the “Ozzie and Harriet” ideal because that ideal never existed anyway. Celebrate your dysfunction.

But dysfunction isn’t exactly the most exciting thing to celebrate. It lacks heft, and that’s why so many of the new Hollywood movies about families feel so thin.

By contrast, Hollywood has traditionally mythologized the functional family by advertising its hallowed, peachy-keen qualities--before “Father Knows Best” on the small screen there was “Life With Father” on the big screen. Right from the beginning, Hollywood’s white picket fences and old town squares were emblematic not so much of what America was but what America wanted to be.

And the myth was a tender trap for generations who then looked to their own families and found them wanting. For the mass audience, the white-picket-fence families on the screen were a balm, but they were also a taunt. We knew life wasn’t like Andy Hardy, but we kept hoping that somewhere out there may be it was.

Families in the movies haven’t always been emblematic of goodness. The family myth, particularly as we moved into the ‘70s, could just as easily be appropriated for its connection to corruption. The family could represent all that was hallowed and horrible about America. The “Godfather” movies proved that.

But the dysfunctional families we see on the screens today are nothing as royal as the Corleones. (Actually, for the business they were in, the Corleones were very functional.) At a time when some of us are primed for movies that really speak to us about the disarray of modern families, we’re fobbed off with movies that resemble big-screen sitcoms. Is the assumption here that we can only comprehend family issues if they’re tricked up and rhythmed like TV?

In “Miami Rhapsody,” Sarah Jessica Parker, playing a woman afraid of committing to her fiance, looks to her married brother and her parents for encouragement and instead discovers that everybody is dallying. In “Bye Bye, Love,” the three divorced dads with weekend custody of their kids meet every Saturday at McDonald’s--their spiritual home. It’s a fitting locale for the film’s fast-food approach to family crises.

Both movies were fashioned by experienced TV sitcom hands, and the approach rankles. Can this really be how we are now meant to receive the family in movies?

The clockwork patter and punch lines and laughs and sobs are programmed to work on us the same way the sitcoms do, but the stories they evoke are not so tidily disposed of. Even by loopy comedy standards, these films feel like a cheat; we know the loopiness of blended, blasted ‘90s families is a lot messier and crazy-making than what we’re getting here. And the films, all located in the white middle class, ultimately reach for the same sentimental shibboleths as their true generic ancestors, the ‘50s and early-’60s family TV shows like “Father Knows Best” and “Donna Reed.” What those shows, and these movies, say is: No matter how far you stray, there’s no place like home. Forget the big bad world outside.

The new films-about-family cycle exists in part because boomer filmmakers, many now raising their own families, are finding it advisable--and commercially viable--to make more family-oriented fare. The cycle is also a response to the flush Me Generation everybody-for-himself era. The movement now is from Me to We.

It’s also a retort to people’s fears and helplessness about that big bad world outside. These films are here to tell you that the Nuclear Family is all the world you’ll ever need. And, if your family is too screwed up, create your very own new family. This is what happens with recovery-movement maven Stuart Smalley and his 12-step helpmates in “Stuart Saves His Family.” It’s what happens in “While You Were Sleeping,” in which Sandra Bullock, as a lonely, lovelorn subway employee, pretends to be the fiancee of a comatose man and ends up acquiring his clubby, huggy clan. In “The Perez Family,” Marisa Tomei plays a Cuban boatlift exile in Miami who concocts a fake family to fool the immigration authorities into letting them remain in America; natch, they become a real family. Family in these movies is what you make of it. Family is a code word for love .

What we define as family may be in flux, but our belief in the family as haven is not. And that sense of protection, of salvation, is our way of using family to cut across problems of race or class or social obligation. If you have good family values, you are supposed to be able to transcend the poverty and racism and crime that surround you; family values are the only moral code you require. This appeal to family in our popular culture--and, of course, in our politics--is an appeal both to an idealized past and an idealized future.

And yet we may have a hard time now believing in the idealized nuclear family, at least in its white middle-class breadwinner-homemaker incarnation, because it carries too much baggage from the “Ozzie and Harriet” ’50s. The great sick boomer joke of our time is that the children of the Family Values Fifties mutated into a generation of dysfunctional adults. In a way, the best--and the most honest--movie about families right now is the documentary “Crumb,” in which the great, howlingly obscene underground artist Robert Crumb, who grew up as a teen-ager in the ‘50s, emerges from his enraged, tranquilized clan as the grinning gargoyle perched atop the white picket fence.

So we can’t take those spiffy peachy-keen sitcom families straight anymore, at least not on the big screen. We still can (almost) on the small screen, perhaps because the prefab world of TV sitcoms is so hermetically sealed that it, deliberately, has no connection to real life. The endless cable TV reruns of “Leave It to Beaver” and all the rest can still be booked as nostalgia trips, but the newer films that draw on that ethos, from “Coneheads” to “Serial Mom” to “The Brady Bunch Movie,” are kitschy spoofs.

That’s where a film like “My Family,” directed by Gregory Nava (“El Norte”), comes in. (“The Perez Family” comes in too, except it’s so hip-swingingly berserk that it spins off into its own outer space.) The adulation that “My Family,” a movie about six decades in the life of a Mexican American clan in East L.A., has received seems pitched to some higher agenda. It’s as if we were meant to believe that a deep and resounding family feeling in movies can only exist now--can only be authentic--if it draws on the ethnic immigrant experience. (Francis Ford Coppola was the film’s executive producer, and, predictably, it’s being called a Latino “Godfather.”)

“My Family” is everything the white middle-class family sitcoms aren’t: It’s full of tradition and history and a love of the soil and characters who speak lines like “The greatest riches a man can have is family” or “The corn is strong, so are the weeds.” Yes, the corn is strong in “My Family.” (So are the borrowings, especially in the Jimmy Smits section, from Satyajit Ray’s “The World of Apu.”)

This sort of agrarian mysticism passing for family rootedness hits many people like a cross between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Diego Rivera, but actually the results aren’t all that different from the standard sentimental Hollywood approach to this kind of thing. “My Family” seasons its people with a healthy sprinkling of salt of the earth. Everyone and everything in it is doggedly “mythic.”

American movies have often been at their best when they are about congregations. Directors like Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpah could create groupings of varmints or gamblers or medics or country crooners and make them seem more like real families than most of the “real” families on the screen.

For it must be admitted that few Hollywood movie families have ever remotely reminded us of our own. We may not always want to be reminded, of course--that’s one reason we go to the movies. But neither should we mistake the advertising for the real goods. The “selling” of the family, in Hollywood as in the halls of Congress, is full of false claims.

And the corn is strong.