Martha Coolidge's Academy Award-nominated "Rambling Rose" is like few movies that I've seen. There's a Pat Conroy vibe here, but obviously a different story. It depicts a girl - the Rose of the title - working as a domestic servant for an affluent family in the southeast US in the '30s to escape prostitution. Before too long, her overt sexuality starts affecting the men of the house.
In telling the story from the older son's point of view, no character really comes across as a "good guy"; all the main characters do questionable things over the course of the movie. What I can say is that each of the cast members puts their all into the rolls. Laura Dern, Robert Duvall, Diane Ladd (Dern's real-life mom), Lukas Haas (the Amish boy in "Witness" and the teenager in "Mars Attacks!"), Lisa Jakub (the older daughter in "Mrs. Doubtfire") and John Heard (the dad in "Home Alone") put on fine performances, showing the characters' many dimensions. It's not a great movie, but the performances make it worth seeing.
