Marvin's Room Review

Scott McPherson wrote the play while caring for his partner during the AIDS epidemic and died at thirty three, and what survives the move to film is his refusal to treat dying as a solemn occasion. Diane Keaton plays Bessie, twenty years into nursing a bedridden father and a scattered aunt in Florida, and she underplays so far that the leukemia diagnosis lands almost as an errand.

Meryl Streep has the harder assignment as Lee, the sister who left for Ohio and beauty school, because Lee must stay selfish without becoming the villain, and Streep keeps locating the fear under the hairspray. Leonardo DiCaprio, nineteen and playing a boy who burned his mother's house down, gives Hank a wariness that skips the usual troubled teenager register, and the scene where he refuses to get out of the car is the best thing in the film.

The problem is Jerry Zaks, a Broadway director on his first feature, who blocks every scene for a proscenium and lights it in flat television daylight. Piotr Sobocinski had shot Three Colours Red the year before and none of that eye reaches this. Robert De Niro's doctor and Dan Hedaya's brother are left running a comic subplot that the editing has already sanded down to nothing.