February 25–March 4, 1999

movie shorts

The Other Sister

Directed by Garry Marshall
A Touchstone Pictures release

by Cindy Fuchs

It might be hard to imagine two more different movies than The Other Sister, a feel-good foray into wealthy, dysfunctional Southern California family dynamics, and 200 Cigarettes, an indie flick portentously set in NYC on New Year's Eve 1981 and populated by an ultra-trendy cast. As different as they are, however, these movies are alike in a couple of crucial ways: Both are mired in clichés and both are pretty much relentlessly bad.

Spawn of world-dominator Disney by way of Touchstone, The Other Sister, unsurprisingly, is more expensive, more obviously commercial. It's directed by Garry Marshall, who is best known for the mega-hit Pretty Woman, but also responsible for Beaches, Frankie and Johnny and Exit to Eden, point being that most of his work lacks subtlety or a sense of its own cultural context. The Other Sister is no exception. Ungainly and annoying, it follows the adventures of Carla Tate (Juliette Lewis), the high-spirited and mildly retarded daughter of self-involved parents played by Diane Keaton, reprising her twitches from The First Wives Club, and Tom Skerritt, looking tired and unhappy during most every scene.

So that there's no mistake that Carla is indeed "other," the movie supplies her with two charming blond sisters, who tend to support her whenever Mom lapses into one of her overprotective spasms. One plans her excruciatingly straight wedding for most of the movie. The other one is really the other sister, at least as far as this movie handles her: She's a lesbian, and Mom disapproves so neurotically that the film itself can't seem to broach the topic without wincing.

According to the trailer, Carla is looking for what everyone wants, "independence." But it comes in the form of a regular old marriage plot: At school, Carla meets a boy who is also mildly retarded, Danny (Giovanni Ribisi), whose unseen father pays his rent, and a big brotherish ex-Green Beret (Hector Elizondo) who never takes off his beret.

The most disturbing aspect of the movie's depiction of the Carla/Danny relationship is its gauche humor at the expense of the principals. On one level the movie argues that they must be considered as any young couple might be considered. But on another, it condescends to them, odiously: These kids are just so cuuute when they don't know how to handle themselves socially, when their behavior is outrageous, when they think that Madonna "invented" sex. Ha ha.

I understand it's supposed to be a stretch for actors to play characters with abnormal speech and thought patterns, but too often (as in this movie or in The Theory of Flight), the stretch seems to be the only point, to the exclusion of anything interesting, like characterization or social context, or sex and class politics. Of course, not every film must address such issues head-on. But this movie raises them and then drops the ball, rendering its critiques of class and generational biases incoherent.

Or rather, it ties them up in a knot that is too coherent, convenient and trite, blaming Mom for Dad's alcoholism and her daughters' misery—the girls only need to get married and suddenly they're fine. To the extent that The Other Sister is so obviously about making peace with otherness, it indicts culture-bound anxieties, angers and ignorant good intentions. But it makes this peace by way of assimilation: Otherness here is only a stage to being like everyone else.