Despite a solid Joaquin Phoenix lead, Inventing the Abbotts is a trashy drama about nothing.There are only two likable characters, Doug and Helen and it's all pointless. Jacey seems to get off the hook pretty easy, considering Doug ends up with Pam. They had an opportunity to give the film some meaning there, but failed. Some stitches and sit down to lunch, don't think so. The narration is also annoying as it doesn't match the actor, it's not like Phoenix is a child, why didn't he just do it?

"When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void." - Diane Setterfield Pat O'Connor directs "Inventing the Abbotts" (1997), a film based on a short story by novelist Sue Miller. A fine portrait of 1950s America, its class tensions and assumptions, the film features cute performances by Joaquin Phoenix, Jennifer Connelly and Liv Tyler.At its best, though, "Abbotts" captures the qualities of good literature. The film may be thin in places, and O'Connor's climax mostly awful, but it nevertheless evokes well the tempo, tenor and wisdom of America's better short-story writers (John Cheever, Raymond Carver etc). At times it even resembles something torn from the pages of Henry James, John Updike or Flannery O'Connor. Co-starring Will Patton.8/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Larger than Life", "Shadow of a Doubt", "Pump up the Volume", "Everything Must Go" and "Happiness".

There was a time when films made for women, the so-called "Women's picture", were also entertaining and involving for a wider audience to enjoy. Now they are an exclusively female designed, designated, manufactured and sold product. The "chick flick" of today. There's got to be more than just endless variations on "who's going with whom". The same giggly obsession of 8-year-old girls in the schoolyard matching up their schoolmates. It reminds me of an analogy with duplicate bridge where the same characters and elements can be played a different way each time and still lead to an arbitrary predetermined ending. Maybe there's a better analogy.When I was a kid the Saturday matinée had one feature left over from the 30s, which was a slapstick race. (The concept was later taken by Hanna –Barbera and turned into "Wacky Racers.) Tickets with numbers were distributed at the box office before the film. Those with the "winning number" would get a prize. It would be the same race every week except for the tacked on last shot in which the number of that weeks "winner" would be announced, which, I feel now, probably coincided with the number least in distribution. The girl with the final embrace seems more determined by whom the talents agencies thought was the better bet to become a money-spinning super-star. It was, as they say in the wrestling industry, a worked result.Yeah, it's worse than soap opera if you think about it. It's just whose going with whom to the total exclusion of the outside world. At least soaps have some stupid plots weaving in and out of the who is with whom. Nothing anyone does, thinks or says has anything to do with engaging the big world at large. There is no context beyond the period setting, here 1957. Wonderful shinny collector's cars (too bad they sound wrong. A '57 T-Bird did not growl like a sports car. It was a big fat V-8 hooked up to a spongy automatic transmission.) Men's clothes are wrong, the hair is wrong, the buses are wrong, as is the whole demeanor of small town folks at the time. Guys, even a-holes, didn't say the f words quite so openly but its used here to emphasize the hurt one woman feels.Hugh Heffner was from a small town in Illinois and when he began Playboy he supplied the whole script for teen-age guys to use in order to get laid. It just wasn't a question of natural and irresistible attraction but men had to go through a whole pseudo- intellectual song and dance to get even some stink on their finger. The phrases "contemporary mores" and "mature adults" were used a lot. People act and talk like 1997, not 1957. Did I hear one brother call the other "dude"?As for what passes for conflict the poor, "working class" boys from the other side of the tracks live as well as M-G-M poverty in the good old days. Actually schoolteachers are considered middle class. They live in a swell house with perfect wood details and well- painted walls. The people who lived on the other side of the tracks were either colored or poor white trash. This concocted conflict has to be folded in to give the bland drama a little bit of spice. Even the environment is flattened out to be uniformly pleasant and unremarkable. Its always-fair weather, none of those sweaty 100-degree summers or winters with snow up to one's nipples. Anyway the retro-design element is shoved out of the way after the first half-hour and the somewhat baffling mating dance takes center stage and the five are whittled down to the inevitable two. And they live happily ever after and had two children, both girls. The End. What was the film about? Harry Cohn used to lay out this kind of plot in the most salacious terms. Yeah, it gets down to that. Permutations and stops and starts between various Holts and Abbotts. Relationships equal couplings equal voyeurism and we're back at cinema's ground zero – watching other people "do it". It's just that certain males get off watching porn and certain women get off on "relationships".Then there's the music, typical for this type of picture - insipid. Synthetic noodelings on an electric piano for two scenes, deep swelling amorphous strings for transitions and actual movement. There's some not quite correct period music and a tribute to the Elvis hit of the era- Love Me Tender, but this is soon submerged under the overwhelming need of shuffling the brothers and sisters around. Like everything else in the picture – nothing to distract you from the issue always at hand- whose getting with whom.I'm not saying there's not an audience for this. Some of the comments on the IMDb were from people emotionally effected by INVENTING THE ABBOTTS. There was just enough information to engage their imaginations, erotic or otherwise, the hell with the world or 1957 or anything else. I'm sure the manufacturers of this film knew exactly who their audience was and manipulated the film specifically for them. It's just that women's films don't have to be one-dimensional panderings. They can tell their stories against a real world with real people or at least set against a backdrop of some import. It's got to be about something more than just who's going with whom.

To be honest, the main reason I saw this movie was because I wanted to see Liv Tyler. To my surprise, here she plays an awkward, gawkish young girl whose appeal is overshadowed by that of her two older sisters. But there is something so engaging and charming about her simplicity, her shyness, and her ability to follow her own path in spite of her family's wealth and social standing.All the cast are terrific, with Kathy Baker, Jennifer Connolly, Liv, and Joaquin Phoenix taking top honors. It is the type of movie that transports you to another time and place, and to another age. You feel what it was like to be 18 in 1957: the class differences, the social constraints related to dating, all the bittersweet ache of young love.At its core, this movie is about the relationship of two brothers. The narration begins with that, and really that is the core that unites all the other subplots. It's a fascinating relationship too, because they are so different yet their paths end up crossing in so many ways. And at the end, it's clear that the viewer is going to be drawn to one (Doug), but yet the other (JC) is not condemned or criticized; you just come to understand that he is driven to do the asinine things he does by powers he cannot seem to tame within himself.I also have to say I was delighted by the fact that the protagonists (Doug and Pam) are modest and moral in their relationship, while the screwed up characters (JC, Eleanor) are promiscuous and amoral. It would have been easy to conform to stereotypes and have Doug and Pam in bed at the earliest opportunity, but the fact that they don't adds tension and drama and ultimately makes for an excellent story. There are a handful of instances of the F-word, and two brief sexual scenes, otherwise this would have been a great movie for younger teens as well.Overall, an excellent movie, badly underrated by IMDb users, and well worth the watching. I gave it 8 stars.