ELVIS AND ANABELLE: Common sense has left the building

Joe Mantegna is a fine actor.
In fact he's one of my favourite actors.
He is magnificent in "House of Games", "Homicide", "Bugsy" and - particularly - "Things Change."
What he's not so good at is convincingly playing a hunch backed, simple-minded embalmer with a Texas accent.
In fact he's downright bad - and hammy.
His portrayal of Charlie in ELVIS AND ANABELLE is a truly bizarre piece of casting.

From his point of view I can understand him seizing the role as an opportunity to stretch and play a character outside his regular range, but sometimes something is outside an actor's range for a reason.
Mantegna never gets to grips with Charlie, substituting a collection of twisted facial expressions for a credible character and spouting some of the hokiest dialogue this side of a Mickey Rooney made-for-tv Christmas movie.
True Mantegna didn't actually write the dialogue but he has to take responsibility for the manner in which he delivers it.
As for the rest of this 2007 film, it promises much but fails to deliver, turning out to be yet another of those teenage-outsiders-brought-together-under-unusual-circumstances-who-eventually-find-each-other-but-not-before-a-series-of-misunderstandings-threatens-to-tear-them-apart stories where the early potential gives way to the dawning realisation that - small details apart - this isn't going to be much different to all those that have come before it.
Max Minghella is Elvis, the darkly smoldering but hopeless-with-girls mortician without a licence son of Charlie. He's taken over his dad's funeral business and lives an isolated life at the rambling family home out on the plains of southern Texas.
20 year old Blake Lively (looking spookily like a young Kate Hudson) is Anabelle, She first enters Charlie's life as a customer, having collapsed and apparently died just moments after winning the Miss Texas Rose beauty pageant.  Given a second chance at life she determines to break away from her overbearing mother (Mary Steenburgen) and lecherous stepfather (a perpetually leering Keith Carradine) and moves in with Elvis and Charlie.
Life being turned upside down coming of age drama ensues.
Lively and Minghella both acquit themselves well, investing their characters with a degree of believability sadly lacking from the far more experienced Mantegna. Writer-director Will Geiger paints an alluring picture of Texas for those with a hankering for small towns and wide open spaces but the parts combine to form a less than satisfying whole.