Pun Salad

A fun movie about major family dysfunction. Nothing earth-shattering, but a decent excuse to avoid broadcast TV for an evening.

All members of the Rizzo family are hiding major secrets from each other. Andy Garcia plays the father: he is a prison guard who sneaks off to acting classes. He's also father to one more son that nobody else in the family knows about. And said son winds up—guess where?—in the very slammer at which Dad works. There are two other kids: one is a secret ecdysiast, earning money so that she can return to the college from which she was bounced. The other is hiding a (relatively innocent) fetish, involving food and high-BMI women. And everyone has a nasty cigarette habit, which they (of course) hide from each other.

In addition to Andy Garcia, there are a number of other name actors, and they all turn in solid performances: Julianna Margulies as the mom, Emily Mortimer as another wannabe actor (with secrets of her own), and Alan Arkin as the acting teacher. But everyone else does a fine job too. It may not be very realistic, because 99 times out of a hundred, the upshot of this level of mutual familial dishonesty wouldn't be funny at all. The movie dances right up to that, and then (probably wisely) dances right back again.