Peter Falk and Paul Reiser shooting pool and coordinating Budweiser product placement in Raymond De Felitta's The Thing About My Folks (Photo: Picturehouse)

If you are feeling especially steely this morning, check out Liz Smith's interlude with Peter Falk as chronicled in today's Post. Falk is back onscreen next week in Raymond De Felitta's The Thing About My Folks—alongside screenwriter/star Paul Reiser and (for a few minutes, anyway) Olympia Dukakis—and Smith has all the raw dirt on Falk's "exceptional turn … in many ways a brilliant distillation of all his many, past, crusty but lovable characterizations."

What prompted Falk's participation? "Well, it was a great script. Paul is a wonderful writer. Forty pages into it, I had accepted. But, to be honest, it wasn't the script, really. Paul told me a story, about visiting his own father, and how his father was watching me in something, and obviously enjoying it, and he remembered his father's pleasure in that moment, and that was the reason he wanted me! Come on, that is the most delightful reason I've ever been offered a role."

Awww! The only problem was the next 60 pages—a repellent, cloying mess of tender father/son bonding, liberal scenery gnawing, fart jokes, line dancing and an overriding mid-life crisis sensibility cut from the fetid cloth of a lost '80s sitcom. That Reiser actually was once upon a time a driving creative force behind a rather good sitcom only baffles me into wondering what could have gone so wrong.

Of course, Falk is right about the film's opening, which De Felitta and his cast navigate with a brisk comic pace belying the film's central "mystery": Where is Falk's wife/Reiser's mother (played by Dukakis), and what inspired her to leave home after nearly a half-century of marriage? At his most interesting, Reiser—who built a cottage industry laughing at the neuroses of relationships in Mad About You and books like Couplehood and Babyhood—gets really, really serious (like Bergman serious) exploring the couple's dissolution; too often, however (read: always), the long, probing monologues end in screaming fits, and De Felitta neuters their resonance with unnecessary camera swoops and hyperactive cutting.

Worse yet, none of Reiser's close readings of marriage are allowed to stand on their own. You cannot mistake his own sneaking distrust of the material when he pulls away from the story of the mother's flight—which his character obviously spent years rationalizing—for the sake of an ill-conceived road trip and a succession of gags and montages that symbolize the best and worst of Falk's self-assurance (he thinks nothing of either fucking shit up in a pool hall or forcing fresh peaches on his allergic son). By the time the pair fall asleep literally embracing beneath the stars, the viewer is either seized in diabetic shock or wondering how many pages into the script the film has to travel before one can ask for his money back.

Smith acknowledges as much today—"(Folks) breaks no new ground plot-wise, really. The adult child-aging-parent-bonding thing."—but warms up quite a bit to Falk's hot-old-man styles:

Peter made a fine impression with his deep tan, a thick thatch of salt-and-pepper hair — mostly salt, the pepper gives it some "depth" as the stylists like to say. He wore a beautiful, very California-ish, floral linen shirt. … Aside from acting, Falk paints. "Ahhh . . . mostly charcoal. Sketches. I think you should be able to draw before you paint. I don't know how ready I am for color. But you can check my stuff out on my Web site, peterfalk.com."

Sure, Peter, sure. We are still in therapy over Pierce Brosnan's "work," but we will try to get right on it, I promise.