Safe Passage

As a showcase for actors, "Safe Passage" is a satisfactory performance vehicle. But as a movie, it's overly sentimental and predictable, seeming better suited to network-TV fare.

The centerpiece character is played by Susan Sarandon, doing what is essentially a variation on her "Lorenzo's Oil" character, an overprotective mother who seems to find validation when a real tragedy occurs.

In this case, Sarandon plays an aggressive, intense mother of seven sons who has spent most of her live watching over them and has become rather obsessive about it. Only her youngest son is still at home, but her mother-hen instincts have not abated.

She is also separated from her husband (Sam Shepard), an insensitive, self-centered lout, who will eventually be revealed as a lovable lug who has trouble interacting and expressing emotion.

The plot goes into gear when word comes that one of their older sons, Percival (Matt Keeslar), who joined the Marines and was shipped to the Middle East, is missing after his barracks is blown up.

So, Shepard and Percival's brothers all gather at home, to await news. And, as you might expect, all the sons are quite different:

— Izzy (Sean Astin, of "Rudy") is the family nerd, a quizzical scientist with an insatiable need to question everything. When his father is stricken by occasional, temporary blindness, he doggedly seeks a solution.

— Alfred (Robert Sean Leonard, "Dead Poets Society") is calm and collected, the family stabilizer who is seemingly dispassionate and always cleans up after everyone else. (He brings with him his live-in girlfriend, played by Marcia Gay Harden, a psychologist with two children.)

— Track star Gideon (Jason London, "Dazed and Confused") comes home from college in Utah, despite his parents' encouraging him to stay at school. (Early in the film, after Sarandon has a "premonition dream," she says something has happened to one of the boys. Someone replies, "We know it's not Gideon, because nothing bad ever happens in Utah.")

— Twins Merle and Darren (Philip and Steve Ross) are around for comic relief.

— And with 14-year-old Simon (Nick Stahl) still at home, Sarandon is allowed to continue practicing her obsessive nurturing.

The players are all quite good, and some of first-time screenwriter Deena Goldstone's dialogue is bright and quite funny, which makes much of "Safe Passage" an enjoyable ride. But veteran theatrical director Robert Allan Ackerman, who makes his film debut here, seems barely able to keep Goldstone's soap opera contrivances and rampant eccentricities afloat at times. It's the Murphy's Law of movie families — anything that can go wrong will.

Still, it's a joy to see Sarandon in this kind of role, and the supporting cast is top-notch. And that may be enough for an evening's entertainment.

"Safe Passage" is rated PG-13 for profanity, vulgarity, sex, violence and drugs (marijuana smoking).