A misfire developed at the Sundance Institute: First-time writer/director Theresa Connelly should have kept working until she figured out how to establish some convincing sense of time, place and ethnicity. Apparently set during the early '60s (a guess
based more on attitudes than anything else) in Detroit (it says so onscreen), this discombobulated comedy-drama about the foibles of the close-knit, working-class Pzoniak clan fairly oozes inauthenticity. Hard-working immigrants Bolek (Gabriel Byrne), a baker, and Jadzia (Lena Olin), a cleaning woman, have five children at home: four grown sons and dangerously beautiful teenage daughter Hala (Clare Danes), a high-scho...
Released:
1998
Rated:
PG-13
Length:
107 mins