Inheritance, Italian Style

This low-budget dramedy about sisters warring over their mother's valuables plays like a soap opera with bad accents.

You’d be surprised how deep family rifts can go over money and stuff. People who stop speaking to each other for years, even decades. Accusations, lawsuits, malicious gossip… all over your granny’s armoire. When you get to talking about millions of dollars too, it can get quite brutal.

“Inheritance, Italian Style” is a comedy with some dramatic notes that looks at five sisters who are invited to their mother’s Italian villa to divide up some paintings and furniture. Most of them live in America and have very go-go professional lives and fading marriages or relationships. So this is an opportunity to reconnect and renew some of the squabbles that have already been going on for years.

The catch is that their mother (Dawn Campion) is still very much alive, as is their father (Michael Scimeca), a doddering and nearly deaf figure referred to simply as “the professor.” Ostensibly she wants to clear out the clutter but also give something meaningful to her daughters while they’re still young enough to appreciate it.

Still, a mysterious figure dressed all in white like Don Fanucci from “The Godfather Part 2” shows up at the doorstep from time to time, and the whispered conversations indicate something else is afoot.

One of the problems of the story, written and directed by Doug Bremner, is that the sisters and their various male partners and children tend to blur into a Greek’s chorus of affectations rather than distinct characters with personalities and motivations. (Zoe Myers, Maggie Gwin and Caroline Avery Granger play the dominant three older ones.)

Most of the women are type-A headstrong career executives, running nuclear power plants or corporate money-makers. They continually try to one-up each other in their mother’s eyes and put down their sisters. It’s sibling rivalry to the nth degree.

One unifying theme is their relationships are a mess. One has a husband who’s an international art dealer, so his motivation for showing up for the giveaway are pretty clear. Another is a heart surgeon who actually brings along his girlfriend on the trip with his wife, thinking he’ll somehow keep them separated. (Narrator’s voice: he does not.) One guy is a nervous wreck of a psychiatrist who tosses around a lot of relationship advice while seeming to heed very little of it in his own. And so own.

Two daughters never left home. Tristana (T.J. Sanson) is a depressed, suicidal mess who throws herself under cars or tries to swallow lots of pills. Duplecia (Concetta DeLuco) is a chain-pot-smoking hippie type who decries her sisters’ corporate job and focus on physical wealth — though that doesn’t stop her from scheming for the deed to momma’s house.

(Considering mother’s very extravagant Italian accent, one wonders why none of the daughters seem to have even a trace of one — especially the ones who still live there.)

Things proceed with a lot of predictable slamming-door encounters and farcical set-ups. There’s some bed-swapping of husbands as they are thrown out one door and invited in another. The kids get a little bit of time, including the surly 14-year-old sold who’s either playing video games or throwing around f-bombs.

This is a movie that isn’t very funny or smart. The characters tend to fit into vague archetypes and their conversations don’t sound anything like how real people talk. The low production values don’t help, with the film shot in Atlanta with a few stock footage shots of Italian landscapes spliced in poorly.

This is one family you needn’t bother spending any time visiting.