- Comedy
- 106 min
Rotten Tomatoes49%Metacritic60IMDb6.0
Hope isn't for everyone.
In this winsome comedy, an entitled Economics professor pursues a tactic to buy an ailing widow’s mansion for nothing, but he quickly realizes that his seemingly foolproof strategy won’t be as easy as he thought.
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Character
Contemporary, spare, classical in form and comic.
- contemporarynostalgic
- sparerichly built
- classical in formformally daring
- gravecomic
- effortlessdemanding
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Reviews on TMDB
Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Tastebuds's numbers.
- Brent Marchanton TMDB · Apr 20246/10
Is “the American Dream” still alive and well, or is it a pipe dream whose time has come and gone (and perhaps never really was)? That’s the question rhetorically posed in this modestly entertaining fact-based debut feature comedy from director Paul Dektor, which examines the efforts of an optimistic yet cynical economics professor/would-be novelist (Peter Dinklage) with meager means who repeatedly attempts to buy a home far above his pay grade. He’s discouraged by his frank but somewhat oily real estate broker (Matt Dillon) from continuing in this futile Quixotic pursuit until he finds an offer that seems too good to be true, one proposed by an eccentric wealthy widow (Shirley MacLaine) who’s in the early stages of dementia and is fiercely defended by her daughter (Kim Quinn), an astute lawyer determined to liquidate the deal before she and her heirs get swindled. The result is a comedy of errors with warm, fuzzy edges that makes for an often-sweet and tender comedic romp, despite an occasional overreliance on slapstickish humor to sustain laughs. The script is full of delicious little twists and turns, though sometimes the overall narrative doesn’t hang together quite as well as i
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Cast
- Peter DinklagePhil Loder
- Shirley MacLaineAstrid Fanelli
- Kimberly QuinnMaggie Pennington
- Danny PudiCraig
- Matt DillonDell
- Danny GloverJerry
- Michelle MylettClare Milano
- Peter KelamisOfficer Burt
- Rebecca OlsonBeatrice/Babette
- Garry ChalkNicolai
Crew
- Paul DektorDirector
- Theodore MelfiScreenplay
- Nicolas BolducDirector of Photography
- Jeff RussoOriginal Music Composer
- Lisa RobisonEditor
- David GinsbergProducer
- Peter DinklageProducer
- Kimberly QuinnProducer
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