Jayne Mansfield’s Car

Alabama, 1969. Robert Duvall is the patriarch of a fairly well-to-do family. He was once married to a woman, the mother of his four adult children, but she divorced him and married an Englishman and moved to London and had more kids. Now she has died, and the English arrive in Alabama for the funeral. Cultural clashes between the well-educated and upper class Brits and the almost-redneck Americans ensue. We quickly grew bored with this inferior Tennessee Williams material. Not even good performances by Duvall (in his patented grumpy old man role), John Hurt, Kevin Bacon, and Billy Bob Thornton could rescue it. We turned it off about halfway through.