MOTHER

Starring Albert Brooks, Debbie Reynolds and Rob Morrow Directed by Albert Brooks Rated PG-13, with profanity and sexual issues; running time 104 minutes With 10 as a must-see, Jack gives this film a 9

(Jan. 16, 1997) -- Can a guy ever hope to get along with women if he didn't get along with the first woman in his life? That's the question at the core of Mother, the funniest, most accessible comedy yet from writer-director Albert Brooks.

Best of all, Mother features the comeback performance of 1996 -- a finely shaded comic gem from Debbie Reynolds as the title character.

Brooks plays John Henderson, a modestly successful sci-fi novelist who has just gone through his second divorce. It strikes Henderson that he won't ever have a good relationship with the opposite sex until he explores his relationship with his mother, Beatrice.

He decides to challenge the theory that you can't go home again.

John moves back in with his mother, gets all his old furnishings out of the garage, and tries to recreate the bedroom of his youth. He's trying to create the optimum laboratory conditions for his "experiment."

Mother, meanwhile, seems befuddled, at least on the surface. We -- and John -- eventually learn she is much smarter than we might suppose.

Mother and grown son first struggle through basic superficial conflicts. John insists on a vegetarian non-processed-food diet, while Mom keeps bringing ancient frozen bricks of meat and cheese and prepared foods out of her apparently bottomless freezer. (In one of the film's funniest sequences, Mom brings out a block of frozen cheese that's big enough to be the cornerstone for an office building.)

More serious concerns begin to emerge, though. Mom has never been able to hide her disappointment in John's career; she would rather he'd write conventional novels. John also feels he's fallen behind his younger brother Jeff (Rob Morrow) in a competitive race for Mom's affection.

The script, by Brooks and his regular collaborator, Monica Johnson, deals with each issue humorously, and with a surprising degree of warmth. However, enough of Brooks' cynical and neurotic screen personality survives to please the filmmaker's longtime fans.

In her first major film role in a quarter-century, Reynolds is a revelation. The veteran star of Singing in the Rain perfectly captures the subtle nuances and complex layers within Beatrice, gradually revealing the character's unexpected depth while never losing sight of the need to keep us laughing.

Though psychologists and family therapists may find the film's ending too pat, it offers a satisfying conclusion to a film that is designed, after all, as a comic fable and not a serious case study of a dysfunctional family.

That said, Brooks' clever film offers plenty of amusing food for thought for any adult who finds himself shrinking uncomfortably back into childhood in the presence of his mother.