Because I Said So (2007)

Because I Said So features a trio of likable actresses (and Piper Perabo), all of whom are written so badly they practically scream the material in a dead-end effort to make it funny. Boy, does that not work. Instead, Diane Keaton, Mandy Moore, and Lauren Graham spend 102 minutes yelling at each other, yelling at their husbands, yelling at their colleagues, and yelling. When Diane Keaton's character suddenly gets laryngitis, you're hard-pressed to believe it isn't from all of the screenplay-mandated yelling. Amazingly, her inability to speak a word still manages to yield one of the worst scenes in the film.

In Because I Said So, Diane Keaton plays Daphne, a horrendous sociopath nightmare of a mother who the movie thinks it is depicting as slightly, endearingly overbearing. Daphne has raised three successful, independent daughters all on her own, and one would expect her to feel some pride for these whomen who grew up to be 1) a psychologist, 2) a business-owner of a catering company, and 3) Piper Perabo. After all, two out of three ain't bad. Instead, she seems to exist in a century where a woman's sole purpose in life is to meet a man and get married, and to fall anywhere short of that goal means utter, abject failure for mother and daughter alike.

Daphne places a personal ad in which she intends to find the man of her dreams for her daughter, Milly (Moore). The moment this plan is set into motion, you can literally chart out the progress of the rest of the film: Daphne meets a guy she likes for Milly and a guy she doesn't like for Milly, both guys meet Milly, Milly takes to the charming musician over the stable rich guy, rich guy disappoints her, musician guy gets upset that Milly was dating two guys at once, Milly discovers her mother placed the ad, Milly gets mad, Milly wins musician guy back and grows even closer with her mother at the end. And Diane Keaton starts dating the dad from 7th Heaven. Actually, you're forgiven if you didn't call that last one.

And yet, mysteriously, no one ever tells Daphne to get out of their lives and drop dead. Daphne involves herself in the lives of her daughters to a dangerously unhealthy extent, and even when they tell her to back off, it's in a gentle, charming way that says, "Mom, we know your life has been tough, and we appreciate how you raised us as a single mother, but now you need to let us live our lives and make our own mistakes." Even more frequently, the girls thank their mother for this fever pitch of meddlesome behavior, and Milly goes so far as to take her mother in after Daphne comes down with a case of laryngitis, just so they can be confined to one place long enough to bond over orgasms (I'm not making this up).

Great actors can elevate slight material, and even the worst of scripts can be rescued by a transcendent performance. And elevating slight material is exactly what Diane Keaton does NOT do in her performance as Daphne. Such a monster of a character would be a difficult feat for anyone to pull of, but Keaton goes to her "I was adorable in the 70s" bag of tricks and pulls out the same quirky outfits she was wearing when she played Annie Hall. But these flowers and stripes and hats and pantsuits don't play in the new millennium, especially when she's asking us to take her seriously as an older, more distinguished actress. Everyone in the world wants to like Diane Keaton, and like Diane Lane in the equally atrocious Under the Tuscan Sun, the movie simply won't let us. Instead, it makes her spend the entire movie just carrying around cakes (not in boxes, across beaches and other gross outdoor locations), for no reason that is immediately obvious to the viewer.

The other characters don't make out any better. By far the most egregious scene in the movie belongs to Lauren Graham's Maggie. Graham plays a psychologist who, when faced with the need to give her codependent sister advice, tells her suicidal patient (poor Tony Hale) that she has to reschedule him. When he protests and announces that he is actually going to kill himself, Milly opens the window to Maggie's office and screams at Tony Hale that Maggie has been telling Milly for ten years that he's been threatening to kill himself, and if he's that serious about it he should just go ahead and jump out. I hope Daphne is as tenacious at finding jobs for her daughters as she is at finding men, because Maggie should have had her license revoked years ago for these Gothika-level ethical violations. Then again, it's no wonder these girls turned out so deranged. Just look at their mother.

Recommendation: If ever required to watch this movie, leap out the window Milly so helpfully opened.