One woman's story, more traditionalist than feminist, more concerned with responsibilities than freedoms. The director is the impeccably credentialed Martha Coolidge (Not a Pretty Picture, Rambling Rose), so that's all right, then. The story as such, although not lacking in particulars, is also not lacking in banalities: the brassy ethnicity (Italian Catholics in Bensonhurst), the awkwardly alien (i.e., non-Italian Protestant) stepmother, the thickish blue-collar boyfriend, the Irish charmer who comes from outside "the neighborhood," who talks of Degas and of Massenet, who seems altogether too good to be true, and who, when the illegitimate baby arrives, proves to be very false indeed. (And without even having to hear about the birth-defect.) The mutual rejection of mother and infant is an interesting stretch, but just a short stretch, before the return to banalities: the heroine hitting the road in search of her long-lost biological mother, and taking the time in a bus-station restroom for that banal rite-of-passage of snipping off her hair (and doing a thoroughly professional job of it, too). Geena Davis goes a long way, not the whole way, toward making all this palatable. Even slightly savory. With Stephen Rea, James Gandolfini, Philip Bosco. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd