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Family Tree

2000, Movie, G, 89 mins

Family Tree: Review

FAMILY TREE
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Corny, but better than average family entertainment. Awkward, chubby, 10-year-old Mitch Musser (Andy Lawrence) — nicknamed "Mess" by his so-called friends — is the kind of kid who's always the last to be picked for football and whose best friend is an oak tree. Overshadowed by his high-school quarterback brother (Matt Lawrence) and coddled by his understanding mother (Naomi Judd), Mitch spends most of his free time up in the branches of a majestic tree that he and the rest of the small town of Wagstaff have named "Old Oak," talking to it until dinnertime. Mitch's father (Robert Forster), meanwhile, has been fighting to convince a plastics firm to build a new plant in Wagstaff, an out-of-work manufacturing town whose last working factory shut down more than two years ago. The only problem is that in order for the new factory to go up, Old Oak will have to come down. Determined not to let his best friend die, Mitch hooks up with Larry (Cliff Robertson), a scruffy drifter with a mutt named Walden and a mysterious past; Larry teaches Mitch something about self-respect and — can you stand it? — civil disobedience. Directed with cloying, made-for-TV blandness by Duane Clark and set to a drippy soundtrack that never lets up, the film teaches the usual lessons about sticking to one's principles and the way even the knottiest moral issues — environmentalist ideals vs. food on the table — will eventually be solved via some deus ex machina. But the lessons happen to be delivered by an unusually fine cast: Forster is always good, the younger Lawrence manages not to annoy, and it's nice to see Robertson back in anything. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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