# Other Sister, The (1999)

### reviewed by
Serdar Yegulalp

    The Other Sister (1999)
    *
    A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
    Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp

Some subjects never get a fair shake in the movies. Mental retardation is one: offhand, I can only think of two movies that had retarded characters who were entirely convincing and human. "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" and "Dominick and Eugene" were both wonderful movies regardless of their subject matter.

Maybe that's the heart of the problem. "The Other Sister" would be a dreadful movie even if the retarded characters were Nobel laurelates. It's overlong (130 minutes), overplotted, tedious, contrived, and absolutely agonizing to endure -- especially if your understanding of mental retardation goes beyond TV movies-of-the-week.

In the film, Juliette Lewis plays Carla, a retarded girl of 18 who has spent most of her youth in an institution for the mentally handicapped. She now wants to go back home and train to be a veterinarian, but her mother (Diane Keaton), as is always the case in movies like this, is opposed to her daughter doing anything that doesn't fulfill the label of "retarded person". The father (Tom Skerritt) is all for it, of course. It wouldn't be a movie without conflict, but the conflict here is fake.

Carla eventually enrolls in a local polytechnical school and meets up with Danny (Giovanni Ribisi), who is also retarded, and whose job seems to consist of unstopping the brass instruments in the school band after they've been pelted with marshmallows during football games. Yes. Why are they interested in each other at all, retardation aside? A more honest movie would not need to use manufactured scenes, like the cringe-inducing one where they puzzle over "The Joy of Sex", to make them comprehensible as a couple.

The movie also commits the cardinal sin so common to movies like this, where retardation is used as a gimmick and not taken seriously. In one scene, Danny gets drunk (under circumstances which any bartender or seasoned drinker would find ludicrous) and delivers a speech that is so obviously not his own words, but the screenwriter speaking through him. How's about that? The movie not only doesn't bother to give us convincing characters who are retarded -- it doesn't even allow them freedom of speech!

I know a fair number of retarded people. Most of them resent being condescended to; they are not "cute", not "quaint", not "funny", and certainly not insensitive to callousness. They are also, alas, not as sitcom-witty as the folks in "The Other Sister", but that's life: nobody in real life talks like a sitcom (and if you do, see a doctor).

The director, Garry Marshall, has Ribisi and Lewis act retarded by having them garble half their lines and walk funny. Does he know anyone who is retarded? Dd they really think that the lameness of the performances would be overcome by everyone's good intentions? Didn't anyone realize how contrived and phony this story was, before it was put on the rails? Evidently not. "The Other Sister" (even the title is virtually inexplicable) is going to be stuck in my craw for a long time as one of the worst movies of 1999.

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