DIANE KEATON - MOVIE REVIEWS: BECAUSE I TOLD YOU

Many critics are expressing downright sadness over Diane Keaton's latest turn as an overbearing mother in Because I Told You. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post calls her performance "a steep drop" from her earlier films. "The beloved actress is scraping below the bottom of the barrel with this desperately unfunny farce," he writes. Carina Cocano in the Los Angeles Times remarks that Keaton "has been reduced to a set of basic features (neurotic isolation, emotional frigidity, clumsiness) served up in the most infantilizing manner." Writes Jan Stewart in Newsday: "[It's] like watching a Keaton character that has weathered a concussion and pulled out of a coma 25 years later, her trademark eccentricities intact but ratcheted up to the nth degree." Stephen Cole in the Toronto Globe and Mail calls the movie, "a 105-minute cringe-a-thon that reduces the Katharine Hepburn of her generation to a sitcom harpy presiding over a brood of Valley Girl chicks." The problem, Michael Phillips observes in the Chicago Tribune, lies not so much with Keaton's performance but with everything else about the film, from script to direction. It amounts, he says, to "formulaic romantic junk." It's worse, writes Claudia Puig in USA Today: "It's so derivative, unfunny and thuddingly bad that it's one of the more cringe-inducing movies of a genre chock-full of clunkers," she comments, noting that Keaton's performance is "grating, mannered and often horribly slapstick." Still, Carrie Rickey staunchly comes to Keaton's defense in the Philadelphia Inquirer, writing, "Keaton is a national treasure, always worth the visit even when, as is the case of Because I Said So, her movie isn't."

02/02/2007