Rory Culkin strongly plays Eli, an eleven-year-old whose walking-on-eggs approach to teenagehood is both sensitively portrayed and genuinely affecting. She's a therapist dealing with the problems that often arise in a two-decade-old marriage. Catherine Zeta-Jones, occupied with pregnancy or other projects or litigation in London over wedding photos, didn't make the scene but Bernadette Peters is well cast as Michael's spouse. A few other Douglas clan members act and Joel Douglas co-produced the film. Douglas pere is the elder lawyer and his son is a partner in his firm, a man yearning for public service and elective office. His son, Michael, not exactly unknown to the screen, is his son in "It Runs in the Family" and no amount of acting need substitute for the palpably real love between the characters. The story is pedestrian, soap operish, New York, Jewish culture-inflected (Kirk Douglas rediscovered his Jewish roots not that long ago, celebrated an aged man's well-publicized Bar Mitzvah and wrote a book about his renewed commitment to Judaism). But the acting ability, the skill in projecting emotion, the cunning character who draws the viewer into a picture - Kirk Douglas is STILL Kirk Douglas. Damn well! Speech therapy has only taken him so far - forget the sharp voice of the star of roaring Westerns or a Viking saga. The neurological event left his speech but not other faculties impaired. Having escaped death in an aviation disaster, Kirk Douglas was felled, but hardly destroyed, by a very serious stroke. This unusual ensemble production, with most of the main characters played by the Douglas clan, is ruled in reality and in this quirky pastiche of intergenerational and marital disharmony and reconciliation by the great paterfamilias, Kirk. Boy, "It Runs in the Family" has set off more than a few critics' hot buttons.
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