Stuart Saves His Family (1995)

A better movie than expected, but what is with all the comments about it being a comedy. If it is, it must have been the first one where i didn't laugh once.Al Franken takes on a gutsy project but it is really not that interesting. It has some nice characters but it is a little too nice. Maybe it was watered down for a PG-13 rating to sell it to a teen audience. If it was, it shows a serious miscalculation of marketing strategy. There is virtually nothing here that appeal to that group.It did get the addiction part almost right, although the ending is a little too nice again. I wish they would have ended it on the intervention stuff and left the last scene out.Still, I am glad I saw it, because it was somewhat different and the main character wasn't as annoying as I thought. Just wish they had made it a little more raw.

surprisingly, what I thought would be a farce had some interesting depth. What's starts off as lampooning 12 step programs becomes a touching and somewhat tragic ride through recovery. Laced with humor, this is a dry, yet poignant study in recovery from 'our family of origin'. I watched this with several friends and we were stunned at the ending, namely,Stauart did not save all his family because it was their choice not to be saved. As Stuart says, he needed to move on with his life.Its easier to wear slippers than to carpet the whole world. True enough,you cannot fix others, particularly those who do not want to be fixed. Some revel in their misery or are so addicted to it some real peace would be disturbing. D'on't expect a major laugh riot here in this movie, expect the subtleties of humanity and conditions to give you a smirk, a grin,an 'aha' here and there. The real humor comes in Stuarts' journey. I salute the filmmakers for adding some really 'teary' moments.Alcoholism isn't fun. Perhapsthose touched by this disease,particularly those children (grown or not) who still ache from the hurts. You'll cheer Stauart for his own personal choices, not because he couldn't get his father into rehab.

I am a fan of Al Frankin and had wanted to see this movie for quite a while. As it turns out, that was 12 years, but I finally saw Stuart Saves His Family on HBO. The short answer is that I liked it a lot, but not for the reasons that I was expecting to like it for. The movie was funny, but not really laugh out loud funny. The characters were too well developed for "laugh out loud". It would have felt mean to laugh at the alcoholic father who has no clue that he has a problem. The stoner brother who eventually figures out he's wasted his life. The enabler mother. The obese sister who deals with her stress by eating pound cake. I found myself rooting for these people, and not really wanting to laugh at them. There are certainly funny parts of the movie, and Al Frankin is a funny guy, but I think that the problem with Stuart Saves His Family is that it is too well done for an audience who want Wayne's World (One of my favorites, BTW) and instead got a serious movie about dysfunctional people with very real problems where you laugh with them and not at them.

This is probably the best of the SNL films simply because there is a back story behind the film. (Unlike the terrible "It's Pat!")Those who watched SNL while Al Franken was on it saw the Smalley character. (His adage: I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and gosh darn it people like me!) In these skits, Smalley (who obviously had had a very difficult life) described his family. (On Halloween "I thought of going as a feeling but what does dread look like really? Other than my mother.") The skits would give the viewer images and makes us wonder how bad this family actually was. Now we know.So many SNL films fail because they stretch a 2 minute skit into ninety minutes. One reviewer called it "Trying to stretch a piece of chewing gum across I-25, sometimes it makes it, most times it doesn't." This movie had great fully developed characters. There was no reason to stretch anything.Al Franken plays the character with such sensitivity and such love and such heart that you can't help feeling for the poor guy. You can tell that this character is a sweet, kind human being who simply never got a decent start in life and is trying to do things right.The scenes going back to Smalley's childhood complete the story. Including the funny scene about the family's trip to California.To those who that this movie is as bad as "It's Pat" I beg to differ."It's Pat" never worked because it was never meant to work.My only regret is that it failed so miserably box office wise and we'll never see a sequel. Al Franken is also no longer on SNL. I miss Stuart.This movie gets an 8 out of 10. It's a great movie. A great movie to watch when you feel sorry for yourself or having a bad day.