Floating Away Reviews

Calculated in its assaults on the heartstring and insistently faux-rural, this lachrymose dramedy features Rosanne Arquette as alcoholic mom Maurey, who battles her way back from the bottom of the bottle with the help of comic sidekicks and trumped-up character transformation catalysts. Maurey drowns her grief over her papa's death in demon rum, making it easy for her cheatin' spouse, Dothan (Greg Thirloway), to drain their joint bank account and take their baby to his parents' home in Georgia. Maurey, bereft, cuts a deal with two barflies who own an ambulette, and drives cross-country to retrieve her lost lamb. Her traveling companions are a horny, wheelchair-bound braggart Shane (Paul Hogan), and Lloyd, (Judge Reinhold) a dimwit hoping to win back the estranged wife who lives in North Carolina. Along the way, they befriend an abused teenaged boy who stows away in the van. As the odyssey winds down, the destitute quartet accept refuge from Armand (Robert Wisden), a sculptor smitten with Maurey. Shane is forced to defend Maurey after she refuses to repay Armand's kindness with sexual favors, and later, at his family's farm, reveals a troubling secret about his condition. Will a chastened Maurey finally value motherhood over inebriation? This shrill and strident film, which could be called THE DAZE OF WHINE AND CIRRHOSIS, regularly requires its characters to hurl observations about their dysfunctions at each other, as though yelling pieties inherently produced insight. Forced to mouth reams of self-help jargon, the actors smile through their alligator tears. It's clear that Maurey's victory is pre-ordained (the script contains too many redemptive cliches for it to be otherwise), and since screenwriter Tim Sandlin wrote both the screenplay and the novel on which it's based, there's no way around pinning the blame firmly on him.