Funeral Rights

A Southern family confronts death, homosexuality and repression (but not in that order).

So when was the last time we heard from Olivia Newton-John? Can anybody say "comeback time"? Don't get too excited, now.

Seriously, why is it that John Travolta gets to have resurrection after pathetic resurrection, forgiven for endless sins, yet no one seems all that enthusiastic about his former female costar? She is looking a whole lot better these days than everyone's favorite blubbery scientologist. Maybe there actually was something to all that fitness stuff she was doing back in the '80s.

Perhaps she should have waited to have her second coming heralded with a "Behind the Music" special, but Newton-John is now back on the big screen in Sordid Lives. It's a smart role for her, too: She plays a singer, sings a song, then disappears until the end of the movie, at which point she sings a couple more songs, mostly old Southern standards like "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." This way she gets to leave the audience wanting more while simultaneously getting top billing in all the promotional materials.

Meanwhile, the film also delivers the return of Delta Burke, and you know you were just dying to see that happen. Give credit to writer-director Del Shores for filling his script with meaty roles for middle-aged women, but jeez, aren't there enough good out-of-work actresses who aren't Delta Burke? Given the subject matter, one is tempted to deduce that Burke was cast because she'd be fun for a drag queen to impersonate.

Ah yes, the subject matter. Shores, a popular playwright from the South now residing in West Hollywood, has two favorite subjects: homosexuality and the Bible Belt. Seeing as how the two haven't tended to mix very well in real life, there's an instant predefined conflict to be had, and by all accounts Shore deals with this conflict very effectively on stage, both with the play this film was based on and his current hit production Southern Baptist Sissies. What works on the stage, however, doesn't always translate to celluloid.

The setup is a time-tested premise most recently seen in the film Kingdom Come: dysfunctional family members assemble for a funeral in small-town America. The family matriarch has died as a result of tripping over the wooden legs of dull-witted local G.W. (expect this to be a very popular name for dumb redneck characters during the next four years), played by Beau Bridges, the man with whom she was having an illicit affair. Daughters LaVonda (Ann Walker) and Latrelle (Bonnie Bedelia) arrive to mourn at the house of their Aunt Sissy (Beth Grant), then fiercely argue over whether or not their mother should be buried in her favorite mink stole, Latrelle's argument against it being that it's summer, and no one wears mink in summer.

Meanwhile, there are other issues at play. LaVonda's best friend is Noleta (Burke), the wife of the cheating G.W., and there's a delicate balance there between comforting the distraught wife and allowing her to besmirch the name of a dead parent. The late mom also has one more child, Earl (Leslie Jordan, a veteran of Shores' stage productions), known to all as Brother Boy, who was locked up in a mental institution 20 years earlier for being gay and a drag queen, after confessing his attraction to best friend Wardell (Newell Alexander). And Latrelle also has a gay son, an actor who lives out in L.A. and bounces around from therapist to therapist trying to be accepted for who he is. Latrelle remains in denial on this subject, assuming he's only playing gay roles onstage as a form of rebellion (citing Tom Hanks, she tells him, "If you're gonna play homosexual, don't waste it on theater -- win an Academy Award!").

The Southern touches are the film's biggest strength: Shores knows all too well the world of air conditioners, iced tea, poofy female hair à la The Simpsons' Maude Flanders, pointless anecdotes about pigs and impromptu corny witticisms like "Get off the cross, buddy, we need the wood," or "Quit yer grinnin' and drop your linen!" Sadly, it's not even a stretch to imagine Brother Boy getting locked away for being gay 20 years ago. What is a bit of a stretch is his therapist (Rosemary Alexander) who, hoping to write a book by "deprogramming" her middle-aged Tammy Wynette-wannabe patient, resorts to extremely unprofessional behavior that would get anyone in her field suspended, at one point baring her breasts and demanding sexual attention.

The MVP award of Sordid Lives goes not to Burke or John but to Beth Grant, an actress late into middle age who, according to the press kit, is "best known" as Helen, the exploding bus passenger in Speed. Here, she captures the archetypal single Southern aunt to a tee, gossiping endlessly on the phone, constantly offering to feed people and snapping a rubber band on her wrist every time she craves a cigarette ("behavior modi-something-or-other").

Shores deserves a lot of credit for making good use of actresses much of Hollywood probably labels as over the hill, but his directorial and screenwriting abilities still leave much to be desired. Sordid Lives feels like a play in perhaps the least successful way: It's composed of really long scenes that are mostly dialogue, with transition action imagined or implied only. Couldn't we go outside for at least one scene? The total screen time given to exteriors here is about five minutes out of nearly two hours. Shores intersplices long scenes together in the apparent hope of making them seem shorter that way, but he doesn't pull it off: You're left wishing he'd simply stay with the scene he just cut away from. When LeVonda and Noleta suddenly decide, about two-thirds of the way through the story, to literally become Thelma and Louise, it comes out of nowhere, as do their subsequent madcap antics. On the stage, this might have been a neat trick to shock the audience. Onscreen, it elicits a big "Huh?" Having just spent over an hour with these folks, couldn't we have a better build-up?

Shores also doesn't seem to know whose story he's telling. The movie begins with Latrelle's gay son Ty (Kirk Geiger) confessing all, but his tale is mostly irrelevant to the funeral happenings, even though we keep cutting back to his therapy escapades in L.A. (allowing for many L.A. theater-scene in-jokes). Brother Boy is the most captivating, comedic and pathos-laden character (many kudos to Leslie Jordan), but because he's trapped in an institution he can't exactly be our protagonist. Latrelle seems the best candidate, as her emotional epiphany is really the climax of the piece, but since she's been relegated to the sidelines for the first half, she doesn't have the impact she should. Old pros Bridges and Newton-John are just fine, but minor players in the tale.