Life As A House

Synopsis: Architect George Monroe (Kevin Kline) finds himself without a job and with only months to live. His ex-wife Robin (Kristin Scott Thomas) has remarried, but struggles to cope with their teenage son Sam (Hayden Christensen). George decides to build his house and is intent on Sam helping him.

Let's not beat around the bush - a pretty picture with a pass at serious drama is very much what Irwin Winkler's film is about. It's a reasonably-well-made-by-numbers studio product that, if fall shorting of outright melodrama, milks the audience's sentiments for all they are worth - you cry, you laugh, you've seen it all before. A long time ago in fact, for this is reminiscent of Frank Capra's homilistic tales of moral awakening in middle America. Here we have Kevin Kline in the Jimmy Stewart role, dying of cancer and determined to reach out to his estranged son and build his dream home in one combined stroke. Of course it all happens on cue and to the strains of syrupy strings. And the utterly gorgeous (let me say) Kirsten Scott Thomas takes over the nobly supportive (ex) wife role, chipping away at the house frame or returning from the death-bed looking like she's in a Vogue photo-shoot.

The Capra-esque element is updated with a sprinkling of the f-word, drug use and rent-boy sex but it's purely cosmetic and often delivered in a perfunctory manner (the also gorgeous Hayden Christensen is particularly unconvincing). Although I can't imagine this very American film doing especially good business here, it's not all bad. The less-than-gorgeous and even somewhat emaciated Kevin Kline does lend a measure of reality to his role, as does Mary Steenburgen, who is looking in very good shape for her years, but the film is too obviously manipulative to be dramatically credible.

 

 

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