Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Screechy, shrill and shallow

Every film fan has a personal list of least favorite actors who are irritating enough to spark an outbreak of hives.

For years, Diane Keaton had a hallowed place on my list. After the twin 1977 triumphs of “Annie Hall” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” Keaton began a long slide into irrelevance that lasted through more than a quarter-century of forgettable films.

Along the way, she seemed to become not so much an actor as simply a collection of quirky and increasingly annoying tics.

Then in 2003 came a little rom-com called “Something’s Gotta Give,” which turned out to be one of those serendipitous, all-too-rare movies in which the chemistry of a talented cast significantly lifts so-so material.

Working with Jack Nicholson, Frances McDormand, Amanda Peet and Keanu Reeves, Keaton reined in her excesses and gave a warm, heartfelt, funny, adorable, sympathetic performance that served as a reminder of just how good an actress she can be — and sparked anticipation about what she would do next.

That was 2005’s “The Family Stone,” a large ensemble film with so many problems other than Keaton that it constituted only a small step back for her.

Now comes “Because I Said So,” her true encore to “Something’s Gotta Give.” Sad to say, it’s an unmitigated disaster. Not only has she squandered all the good will she created for “Something’s Gotta Give,” she is officially running a mammoth good-will deficit.

With no Nicholson or any other substantive presence to keep Keaton within the general vicinity of reality — her co-stars here include erstwhile pop princess Mandy Moore, the tall slice of unfulfilled promise that is Tom Everett Scott, and Stephen Collins, unctuous patriarch of TV’s “7th Heaven” — she regresses to a startling degree.

It’s as if the pressure of keeping her inner kook so tightly under wraps for “The Family Stone” and “Something’s Gotta Give” had built up to such intolerable levels that she finally had to let it loose to burst like an overripe tomato.

Forced to carry the film, Keaton whirls, swirls, dances, prances, mugs and squawks in ways that made me feel like jumping out of my skin with an intensity that I have rarely felt in a theater.

Keaton is Daphne Wilder, longtime single mom to three daughters — therapist Maggie (Lauren Graham), the oldest; Mae (Piper Perabo), the middle sib, whose profession is never quite made clear; and Milly (Moore), the baby, who owns a catering business, “Good Enuf to Eat.”

There’s no question Daphne loves her kids dearly — but it’s the kind of smothering love that evokes images of jackhammers, steamrollers and two-ton wrecking balls in full flight.

She’s currently fixated on Milly, who to this point has been deeply unlucky in love.

The over-controlling Daphne hatches a goofy plan to place an Internet ad touting all Milly’s fine qualities and then personally interview and screen prospective suitors. “Eww … that’s so ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ ” Maggie observes.

But it does yields the film’s one amusing sequence, when Daphne sets up a command post in a hotel lounge for her interrogations and we’re treated to a parade of geeks and freaks who respond to the ad.

There is one diamond in the rough: cute, clean-cut, articulate architect Jason (Scott), who sends Daphne so far over the moon into giggly coquettishness that you instantly know he’s being set up as Milly’s Mr. Wrong.

Having achieved her goal, Daphne is just about to pack it in when Johnny (Gabriel Macht), a guitarist in the hotel house band who has been watching Daphne in action, ambles over and strikes up a conversation.

Johnny is a loose goose with a porkpie hat and a tattoo on the back of his hand. “And that’s not the only one I have,” he says with a rakish grin. This sets Daphne’s alarm bells ringing so loudly that you instantly know he’s being set up as Milly’s Mr. Right.

Johnny surreptitiously palms one of Milly’s business cards that Daphne had set out on the table, and Milly soon can’t quite believe her good fortune in being pursued by two ardent suitors.

And the stage is set for one of the limpest, most lifeless examples of one of Hollywood’s most calcified genres to come along in quite some time.

The script is a patchwork of clichés, as if writers Karen Leigh Hopkins and Jessie Nelson simply stuffed in pale imitations of random bits that they had seen in other, far better movies.

See Mom and the gals go shopping. See Mom and the gals gather for not one, but two group singing scenes. See Mom and the gals repeatedly rummage in their oversized, overstuffed purses for ringing cell phones. See Mom take not one, but two cakes to the face. See Mom get her computer stuck on a porn Web site.

It’s got dialogue to match, to include the most unintentionally hilarious line of any 21st-century movie to date: “I love that when I breathe you in, you smell of cake batter.”

And on it goes. For no real reason, Johnny is a single dad to a 5-year-old son (Ty Panitz), a juiced-up ping-pong ball forever crashing into things — when he’s not unsettling every adult female he meets with his obsessive interest in “ginas.” (That’s “ginas” with a long “i.”)

It’s tough to pick one scene as the most cringe-worthy, but the top contender is the one in which Daphne confides to Milly that despite having birthed three kids, she’s never had a Big O and longs to know what it feels like. This sends Milly into an excruciatingly detailed description, complete with “Charades”-style writhing and hand motions.

This is a setup for yet another superfluous subplot involving the efforts of Johnny’s single dad, Joe (Collins), to melt Daphne’s permafrost.

Meanwhile, on another planet, Milly goes around and around with Jason and Johnny, with Moore proving she’s equally uninteresting both as an actor and singer.

In one scene, after Jason has lost his temper and snapped at her for breaking a wine glass bequeathed to him by his great-grandmother (say what?), he tries to apologize — sort of. “I can be an ass sometimes, and I hate that about myself,” he says.

Instead of taking this as the warning flare that it is and fleeing for her life, Moore simply lets her mouth hang open and stares at him like a cow, and the film just moves on to some other ill-fitting subplot.

The disjointed cacophony of the script effectively hamstrings director Michael Lehmann, who would have been unable to do much with the cards he was dealt here even if one of his claims to fame wasn’t the 1991 bomb “Hudson Hawk” — arguably Bruce Willis’s worst movie (and that’s saying something).

That’s still no excuse for letting stand such scenes as the one in which Keaton and Moore simultaneously screech at each other (there’s no other way to describe it). The sequence lasts maybe 15 or 20 seconds, but as strong evidence that Einstein was onto something with his theory that time is relative, it felt more like an hour to me.

And just when you think things can’t get any worse, the big “happily ever after” moment arrives. It takes place in a cooking class that Milly is giving to a bunch of senior citizens, who find the moment so besotting that they’re inspired to similarly romantic gestures.

Yes, folks — watch a pair of octogenarians try to suck face without dislodging the oxygen tube stuck up the guy’s nose.

There’s a good reason “Because I Said So” has been released in February, the windswept gulag of the seasonal octoplex calendar — even by the shallow conventions of its genre, it’s a flick to make you shake your head and ask the cosmic question: “What in the world were they thinking?”