PLOT: A meddling mother attempts to find a mate for her youngest daughter by placing a personal ad on the young woman’s behalf. This is possibly the worst movie you’ll ever see.
Because I Said So is a movie about an overbearing mom trying to find Mr. Right for her daughter. As you might imagine, this is just the sort of movie that divides audiences across gender lines. At the screening we attended, all the men were homicidal afterward, whereas all the women were suicidal. Just hope nobody screens this thing in Iraq.
Because I Said So opens with scenes from a couple of weddings. Here is Diane Keaton as the mom, with Piper Perabo and Lauren Graham as the daughters she’s marrying off. Nothing like big, traditional weddings, with fancy dresses and wisecracking women at the very beginning of a movie to let you know where you’re headed on the big screen: Hell.
Now that daughters Maggie and Mae are married, it’s quickly made evident that mom has trouble with her youngest daughter, Milly. (Maggie, Mae and Milly? That’s child abuse, is it not?) Milly has a high-pitched laugh when she’s nervous. One of her sisters comments that at least they finally got her to the point where she shaves all over her legs, not just the fronts. Based on these characteristics, Milly falls somewhere between eccentric and Juliette Lewis in The Other Sister, which, perhaps not coincidentally, also starred Diane Keaton.
Meddling mom is determined to find the right guy for Milly, so she runs a lengthy personal ad and meets all prospective suitors at a local restaurant. After a dreadful sort of music video in which she speed-meets dozens of unsuitable men, Mom chooses a conservative guy played by Tom Everett Scott. She tells him where he can encounter Milly and the potential husband takes it from there.
But wait! Observing mom’s little dating service at the restaurant discovers a cute musician (Gabriel Macht) who comes in handy later when a romantic triangle is required.
There isn’t really much else to the story of Because I Said So, and that means it’s up to Diane Keaton to fill in the blanks with mugging and pratfalls of an unusually heinous nature. She never delivers a line of dialogue without shrieking and flapping her hands and jumping up and down; as we are most fond of Miss Keaton and her work, it was necessary (to combat nausea) to look away quite a lot of the time. A blindfold would have come in handy, and maybe a firing squad to go with.
Because I Said So veers away from embarrassing comedy into just plain embarrassing for its third act. The cute musician has a cute ADHD little son and also his middle-aged dad living with him and you’ll never guess what happens next. Never. Never ever. So we’ll tell you. When mom isn’t being a voyeur on Milly’s dates or telling her what to do or re-arranging her furniture, she finds time to fall madly in love with cute musician’s father (Stephen Collins). Then Milly gets into the heck for having sex with two guys at the same time — and after that we thought we’d seek out the men who wrote this dog’s breakfast of a movie and perhaps beat them about the head and shoulders. Then we discovered the movie was actually co-written by two women, so at that point we just put our head in the microwave. And you will too.
BOTTOM LINE: Because I Said So is one of those rare movies that is so fantastically, fabulously bad, so bursting full of putrid dialogue and appalling scenes, that it becomes worth seeing as some sort of artifact of horribleness.
(This film is rated PG)
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