Fathers and Daughters, film review: A portentous, schmaltzy melodrama

(15) Gabriele Muccino, 116 mins. Starring: Amanda Seyfried, Aaron Paul, Russell Crowe

Aaron Paul and Amanda Seyfried in ‘Fathers and Daughters’

It wouldn't take much tweaking to turn Gabriele Muccino's portentous and absurdly schmaltzy melodrama into a comedy. The dialogue is so mannered, and the performances are so overwrought, that you half suspect it is being made tongue in cheek. The film has barely started than we've had a car crash, a bereavement, references to infidelity and sequences of Russell Crowe writhing around like a man possessed. He plays Jake Davis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer in the Hemingway mould who is suffering from manic depressive psychosis.

Kylie Rogers is his dimple-chinned daughter Katie, or "Potato Chip", as he likes to call her. Jake is trying to raise her as a single dad and keep her out of the clutches of his scheming, self-pitying sister-in-law (Diane Kruger in Ab Fab mode) and her devious lawyer husband (Bruce Greenwood). When he is not cuddling his beloved Potato Chip, Jake is busy at the typewriter, hammering out his latest masterpiece. "You've got a Nobel Prize in that head of yours. If Bellow can win it, you can," his literary agent (Jane Fonda) encourages him. He responds by writing lines such as, "Yes, the tulips are beautiful… for now."

Twenty-five years on, Katie/Potato Chip (Amanda Seyfried) is a psychology student. Still tormented by her childhood, she shuns meaningful relationships but has plenty of sex with men she despises. Aaron Paul is the sensitive admirer of her father's work who courts her attentively, even if he does get a bit upset about the used condom he finds under the bed. The film flits between past and present in random fashion. To add twists to an already convoluted screenplay, Katie is working with a girl (Quvenzhané Wallis) whose childhood was even more troubled than her own.

Crowe brings a soulful intensity to the dad who cherishes his daughter almost as much as he does his writing career. Seyfried's performance is heartfelt and brave in its way but the script doesn't help them. It is lines such as "Men can survive without love but not us women" that make this film such a stinker.