Doug Block comes close to poisoning his family interrogation with dreary self-regard and an NPR-ish tone of simpleton obviousness, but the family, as families often do, offer up some prime rib. After a 54-year marriage, Block’s mother, Mina, suddenly dies, leaving his emotionally distant father stranded in his Long Island home. Or so Block and his two sisters thought. Within a few months, however, the family patriarch, in his 80s, links up with the secretary he’d worked with 30-odd years earlier and prepares to marry. What had been going on? The film is in the end less a detective story than a fascinating portrait of Mina, who’s rediscovered in her own secret diaries as a tempestuously brilliant, literate, chronically frustrated, sexually hungry fireball trapped in Eisenhower Land. If only she had lived longer, or Block had thought to make his movie earlier.
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