MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Sibling Rivalry’ Lacks Adequate Insanity

Sam Elliott may have discovered a new metier. In “Sibling Rivalry” (citywide), he makes a great, grinning corpse. Stretched out on stiff hotel sheets, seraphic smile under a rakish walrus’ mustache, Elliott radiates dumb, narcissistic savoir-faire without moving a muscle.

In the movie, he’s been dispatched by a fatal one-afternoon stand. His partner, Kirstie Alley, as supermarket pickup Marjorie Turner, is left to burble and wail for the rest of the picture, trying to keep this alarming assignation secret from her husband, family, the police--everyone except her lewd-mouthed sister, Jeanine (Jami Gertz). Elliott has it luckier. He gets his laughs by playing, and staying, dead.

Is graveyard humor in a resurgence? Usually confined to William Castle-style horror comedies, it’s lately nudging into yuppie satire--as in last year’s “Weekend at Bernie’s,” with hapless Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman trying to palm off their boss’ cadaver as a jaded, taciturn partygoer.

“Sibling Rivalry” is really two movies--a macabre farce about a repressed, dutiful wife who pays hideously for her one infidelity, haunted by the ghost, or corpse, of her sins; and a more conventional, and less interesting, sentimental sitcom about the family problems of cross-class marriages. This second plot should feed into the first. It doesn’t.

You can practically sense when the movie splits in two--right after Alley’s opening memoir vignettes, in the scene introducing Bill Pullman’s nerdy vertical-blind salesman, Nicholas Meany. Pullman operates in a different comic key than most of the other actors. He’s manic, disheveled, frenzied. His flopping hair, twisted shirt tail and herky-jerky body language are exactly right for the kind of guy, who, trying to fake someone else’s suicide, would help pour laxatives and vitamins down the corpse’s throat.

Pullman immediately raises the laugh levels, but, though Alley again demonstrates her flair for comic hysterics, he’s out of phase with most of the other actors. More than likely, they should have been adjusted to him.

Screenwriter Martha Goldhirsch has the right idea. She’s loaded up “Rivalry” with complications, cross-purposes and preposterous coincidences. But she’s not strong on dialogue, and she doesn’t build up to the right paroxysm. There’s no pungency to the movie’s confrontation scenes; when the revelations come, they always seem 5 minutes too early and several shades too mild.

The cast is largely wasted. As Marjorie’s in-laws, Carrie Fisher, Frances Sternhagen and John Randolph offer a few slim cameos of acerbity, snobbery and fuddle-headedness; Scott Bakula is perhaps too convincing as the de-sexed husband; and Ed O’Neill, as the investigating cop, seems to have wandered over on his way to a “Barney Miller” remake.

Director Carl Reiner doesn’t necessarily miss the laughs here, but he may have taken too genial a tone. He doesn’t crank the movie up to manic spontaneity; he can’t disguise the flatness or shallowness of the family scenes. And perhaps Carrie Fisher, with her post-”Postcards” aura of hip skepticism and comic inflammability, should have played the bad-mouthed swinger of a sister, rather than the smug in-law.

But, even though “Sibling Rivalry” (MPAA rated PG-13 for sexual situations and profanity) is an embarrassing misfire--except for Pullman’s schnook turns, most of its better laughs are contained in its trailer--it still has one imperishable image: Sam Elliott as the man who died smiling. What the movie doesn’t have is the courage of its own bad taste. It’s an over-the-edge farce that keeps tiptoeing away from the brink.

‘SIBLING RIVALRY’

A Castle Rock Entertainment release, in association with Nelson Entertainment. Producers David Lester, Don Miller, Liz Glotzer. Director Carl Reiner. Script Martha Goldhirsch. Camera Reynaldo Villalobos. Production design Jeannine Oppewall. Music Jack Elliott. Editor Durinda Wood. Executive producers George Shapiro, Howard West. With Kirstie Alley, Bill Pullman, Carrie Fisher, Jami Gertz, Scott Bakula, Frances Sternhagen, John Randolph, Sam Elliott, Ed O’Neill.

Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (sexual situations and profanity).