Sisters

Squabbling sisters, sinister secrets, simmering scandals. Oh, the glorious dysfunction! No, it isn’t a daytime soap, or even a nighttime soap, it’s a movie called The Sisters. The Sisters is a film, based on a play, which was inspired by another play. The original play is called Three Sisters, and was penned by Anton Chekhov in the year 1900. It took place in Russia, was first performed in Moscow in 1901 and was, of course, written in Russian. The second play, called The Sisters, was penned by Richard Alfieri at some unknown time and originally performed at the Pasadena Playhouse at some other unknown time. One can assume that Alfieri wrote his stage version well before April of 2005, at which time the film version, also penned by Alfieri and called The Sisters, premiered at the 4th Annual Tribeca Film Festival. Got all that? It boils down to a movie written by a guy based on a play written by the same guy who based that play on a play written by another guy over a hundred years ago. In Russia. So, the 2005 film version of The Sisters should be clear as a bell!

The film is somewhat less muddled than its origins, but not much. It smacks of too much adaptation and not enough originality to bring the story or the characters truly to the presumed present time and place. They don’t fit, any of them, in any sort of world – not the past, not the present. They’re stuck in adaptation purgatory.

We begin with a birthday party for Irene (Erika Christensen), who is turning 22. Irene is the youngest of three sisters, clearly the doted upon baby surrounded by people who seem to have made it their singular goal in life to protect her from anything even vaguely unpleasant. There are her two sisters, Olga (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Marcia (a wickedly fun Maria Bello), who is married to Harry (Steven Culp), as well as a few scholarly, professorial types that seem to hang with the gals, as they all steep in New York City academia. Chief among this group is the good Dr. Chebrin (Rip Torn), beloved by all, known to the family since the girls were wee tots. Along for the ride are professors Turzin (Chris O’Donnell) and Sokol (Erik McCormack). Oh, there’s a brother, too – Andrew (Alessandro Nivola) – and his low class fiancée Nancy (Elizabeth Banks). But this isn’t about the brother, people – it’s the sisters (and their dead father) who drive this drama. Our final lurking male is one Vincent Antonelli (Tony Goldwyn), an old family friend who happens to drop in on our happy little bunch as the celebration is about to begin.

So here we have the set-up for what is basically an hour and a half of bickering, tantrums, revelations and the ritual shedding of childhood innocence. This is a family that knows how to fight (despite their constant assertions that they would do anything to protect poor, young, innocent Irene), and they do so constantly, whenever they aren’t telling each other how much they love, love, love one another. Yawn. It gets old in about fifteen minutes. What starts as good, shrill, spill your guts type verbal diarrhea becomes tedious, melodramatic revelations of plot points we see coming a mile away. They aren’t even very good plot points.

But we aren’t sunk yet! Just because the writing isn’t fabulous doesn’t mean that some good, scenery chewing performances can’t come out of the whole exercise. While we groan at the stilted dialogue, the intermittent formal ode to Chekov’s writing from another era, the overwrought and weirdly unevenly placed score and the pomposity that oozes from the characters like pus from a boil, we get to watch Maria Bello and, surprisingly, Erik McCormack, have a little fun.

Bello is just a complete hag. She’s pretty, so she says whatever she pleases, does whatever she pleases and gets away with all of it. For a while. It is her Marcia that starts nearly all the conflict, some of it with a mean spirited glee that is just a joy to watch. She clearly relishes this role, and her character, despite her many obvious faults, ends up being the one for whom we have a small measure of respect. McCormack is given acerbic, dry comments to utter over and over again. So many that what is witty at the beginning becomes quickly tiresome. But it is his character that gets to show some range, something beneath his acid wit. And he does it marvelously, again clearly relishing the role and holding nothing back. Less impressive is, well, everyone else. It’s bad enough when Alfieri insists on injecting annoying faux-literary-speak into these poor characters dialogue, it’s even worse when it’s coming out of the mouth of “that guy from Desperate Housewives”. The casting is suspect all over the place, from Culp to O’Donnell, who is simply atrociously wooden and unbelievable as any sort of professor.

Some of the writing issues even out a bit in the second half, only to be replaced by other inexplicable inconsistencies, all of which seem to originate this time with director Arthur Seidelman. Both Dr. Chebrin and Low Class Nancy gain markedly stronger accents. If this weren’t odd enough, we go in a heartbeat from TV PG straight to R rated nudity and language. How did the f-bomb get in there all of the sudden? And whose rear end is that? What movie is this and what happened to the episode of “Dynasty In Academia With Snobs” that I was watching? In other words, the film sorely lacks consistency in tone. The small gains in momentum and writing are more than offset by these weirdnesses as we pass into the second half of the film.

So yes, The Sisters has some big problems. At its core, it’s not well written. It isn’t well casted, with lightweight actors expected to carry heavyweight emotional tension. It isn’t well presented, with stilted line readings and bad accents. The emotional catharsis we’re supposed to be witnessing is simply not developed enough for us to care – far too much energy is put into making sure we understand the weighty significance of the past and the lofty position of the academics. The setting is anachronistic in some places, overly stuffy and old fashioned in others, never really fitting anywhere. Punch that up with some overdramatic music and you have a recipe for disaster. But the darn thing simply refuses to completely stink. Those bravura performances from Bello and McCormack stick to you like glue, making you invest in characters that really have no right to that investment. It truly is a triumph of acting surpassing (by a mile) the material with which the actor is presented. These two should be given some special award for “Outstanding Portrayal of Lousy Characters in a Crappy Film”. I can’t really recommend The Sisters; it’s just too annoying on too many levels. But if, late some night when insomnia strikes, it happens to be on cable for free, you might just want to watch Maria Bello and Erik McCormack for a while. They’ll provide a wicked little chuckle, and sometimes that’s as good a sleep aid as any.