MY GIRL
A film review by Randy Parker
Copyright 1996 Randy Parker
RATING: **1/2 (out of ****)
(Review written in 1991)
MY GIRL ultimately takes you on a road to nowhere, but at least the ride there is reasonably pleasant. Anna Chlumsky plays a precocious 11-year-old who's obsessed with death: her mother died in childbirth and her father is a mortician--their house doubles as a funeral home. Chlumsky spends her time hanging out with best pal Macaulay Culkin (HOME ALONE), while her inattentive father (Dan Aykroyd) embarks on an unlikely romance with beautician Jamie Lee Curtis. Over the course of the movie, Chlumsky comes to terms with death and learns to accept Curtis as a mother figure.
Unfortunately, this paper-thin premise doesn't lead to anything meaningful. For starters, the performances are perfunctory. It's hard to blame the actors, however, when their characters are so underwritten. The movie fails to harvest the talents of Curtis and Culkin, though Griffin Dunne is appealing as Chlumsky's English teacher. A bigger problem: the dramatic scenes, which should have been sensitive and heartfelt, are heavy-handed and cliched. MY GIRL does eventually wear you down with its histrionics, but you feel resentful for having your tears jerked so violently from you.
--- Randy Parker rparker@slip.net http://www.shoestring.org
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