Dumb and dumber

>> Juliette Lewis and Diane Keaton struggle through The Other Sister

by MATTHEW HAYS

The young and nubile Juliette Lewis arrived in the public eye in 1991, when Martin Scorsese cast her to great effect in his remake of Cape Fear. Playing a sensual, conflicted teen at odds with her parents and stalked by a psycho, Lewis appeared to have heaps of charisma and never-ending talent. She then followed up with equally solid turns in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives ('92) and Natural Born Killers ('94), effectively proving a fair bit of versatility.

Appearing in a Garry Marshall movie, then, may seem a bit of a step down for Ms Lewis. This is the man behind such TV shows as Laverne & Shirley and Love, American Style, and features like Exit to Eden--not exactly names one associates with high art.

But here she is, doing her best with what she's given: essentially a script best-suited to one of those Sunday movie-of-the-week TV slots. Lewis plays a slightly retarded young woman who's stuck under the constant thumb of her overbearing mother (Diane Keaton). After a long, unhappy struggle, Lewis manages to convince her family, including the most-reluctant Keaton, to let her move out on her own and take a computer course at a vocational college. The mentally challenged lass has soon found a beau (Giovanni Ribisi), and the two fall madly, truly and deeply in love.

Keaton and Lewis drag this dreck up several notches, and actually manage some moving moments. Keaton makes her inner conflict real: on the one hand, she loves her daughter; on the other, her general analness inspires a deep sense of embarrassment about having a retarded daughter. Keaton plays it well, and Lewis appears to capture the frustration of having such a smothering mom perfectly.

With The Other Sister, Marshall aspires to make a pseudo-social-issue film. There's a scene where Lewis, at a large dinner, is under the impression the crowd is laughing at her. In what is quite a poignant sequence, she rises and screams at the crowd to stop making fun of her. Trouble is, there's such an air of condescension running through The Other Sister that, rather than take the retarded seriously, the film too often invites us to laugh at them.

The Other Sister opens Friday, February 26