'Two Weeks' Reviewed By Nick Schager

Four grown-up siblings reunite to take care of their ovarian cancer-stricken mother during her dying days in Two Weeks, a melodrama that, while partially based on the life of writer/director Steve Stockman, nonetheless frequently exhibits a startling ignorance about normative human behavior. Making his feature directorial debut, Stockman approaches his downbeat material with equal measures of somberness and levity, the latter supposedly aimed at replicating the way in which people use wisecracks and sarcasm as a defense mechanism – an emotional barricade – against wellsprings of pain and misery. It's a reasonable aim, yet one that requires a lighter touch than the first-time filmmaker possesses, the result being an awkward hybrid of earnest weepiness and bouncy lightheartedness that's further undermined by numerous scenes that come across as divorced from any sense of recognizable reality.

Wasting away in the North Carolina home she shares with second husband Jim (James Murtaugh), Anita (Sally Field) gets to share her final two weeks with her quartet of kids, a motley bunch of "types" who each boast one distinctive trait. Keith (Ben Chaplin) is a Hollywood filmmaker whose life is guided by a "one day at a time" Zen philosophy, and who has never cried in front of his wife; Barry (Thomas Cavanagh) is a businessman who thinks cleaning up after mom – who does a lot of puking into a bedpan – is icky; Matthew (Glenn Howerton) is the youngest child, and thus feels bossed around and disrespected; and Emily (Julianne Nicholson) is the devoted daughter whose method of dealing with her mother's impending demise is to read every one of her local library's self-help books.

Emily's approach to grief and loss is not unlike that of Two Weeks, which tackles the foursome's traumatic experiences with all the grace and subtlety of a Chicken Soup for the Soul short story. For posterity, Keith is making a movie in which he interviews his mom about her family, a stupendously cheesy device borrowed from 1993's supremely manipulative Michael Keaton-Nicole Kidman tearjerker My Life, and one that's made even more clunky by Field's lapses into affected cheer and pathos. The actress' artificiality during these periodic segments is even more pronounced when juxtaposed with her otherwise gimmick-free portrait of Anita's disintegration, which she embodies with neither vociferous liveliness nor cloying agony but, instead, a sense of quiet dignity that's married to a deep, dark, inconsolable misery over being cheated out of the rest of her life.

Thanks to Fields' generally honest, subdued performance, Anita's plight is never completely trivialized, a blessing considering that the other characters' responses to her terminal fate are treated as excuses for sitcom-ish incidents. Keith and Barry spend most of their time around mom cracking wise and treating their circumstances with semi-seriousness, as during an outing to a grocery store that ends with Keith cursing over the PA system and, consequently, getting himself evicted from the establishment. Such nonsense, operating as a foil for Emily's grim moping, is clearly intended to endear us to these unfortunate souls while alleviating the sadness of the situation. Yet aside from one spontaneous and unforced burst of shared laughter between Keith, Barry, and Emily at the kitchen table, virtually every one of the film's playful incidents – like Barry getting excited about finding his childhood cowboy bed sheets, or a dinner sequence in which the kids make mom feel better by replicating her "sit and spit" eating technique (which involves chewing, but not swallowing, food) – fall painfully flat.

As the narrative's nominal protagonist, Chaplin proves incapable of conveying any sort of believable interior self for Keith, a problem that manifests itself throughout his character's alternately witty and solemn episodes. His unaffecting and often inelegant performance, however, is a shortcoming that pales in comparison to Stockman's bizarrely unrealistic view of family life. It's bad enough that the film goes overboard with largely out-of-place bubbly humor. But more aggravating and off-putting is the wealth of weird, unreal moments, such as any featuring Matthew's wife Katrina (Clea DuVall) – whose out-of-bounds bitchiness, and Matthew's ludicrous defense of it, is nothing short of laughably cartoonish – or a scene that has Barry inexplicably failing to hug his young kids goodbye as they board a plane. Given the familiarity of its subject matter (last dealt with by 2003's The Barbarian Invasions), what Two Weeks ultimately calls for is a more finely tuned, cohesive script – one that that doesn't use familial tragedy as a vehicle for recurring jokes involving the phrase "Blow me."