Avis Metacritic

Plays like a series of well-done but disconnected acting-class sketches, filled with a huge cast of first-rate actors whose careers have all gone into decline.

Rather like listening to Vladimir Horowitz play "Chopsticks."

Annie DeSalvo, a first-time director and screenwriter, can't escape the made-for-TV feel but does manage to give her cast, mostly once-big names fallen from grace and popularity, flashes of humanity between lessons about various saints and sermons disguised as dialogue.

Smacks of a certain kind of TV movie filled with pious uplift, even as it makes token concessions to contemporary lifestyles.

All the obligatory plot elements are there. Love and loss, anger and forgiveness, illness and death. But they never flow together to make a coherent story. Instead, they just pop up whenever the script is in trouble. Which is all the time.

Only a memorably commanding Ruehl transcends the limitations of her two-dimensional character.

We all know how actors overact when they play Italians, and we all know how actors overact when they play brain-damaged characters, so just imagine Knight's performance as a brain-damaged Italian American.

The movie should be praying to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Maybe he could perform a miracle and turn this into a cable offering, so no one has to buy a ticket to see it.

The characters seem both reduced and idealized, and the plot has turns a dispassionate dramatist would avoid.

Although the concept seems promising enough, it is undone by disastrous casting decisions and an utter lack of ensemble unity.