Jennifer Connelly in Some Girls.

Some Girls is one of those movies that can't seem to make up its mind what it wants to be. It tries at different points to be a romance, a coming of age story, a screwball comedy, a drama and even very briefly, a ghost story.  As you might expect of any movie that tries to do so many things, it fails at all of them.

Michael, played by a young Patrick Dempsey, is invited to spend Christmas with his girlfriend's rich and eccentric family at their home in Canada.  Almost immediately upon his arrival at the home, Gaby tells him that she doesn't love him anymore.  Her two sisters express an interest in him and her grandmother mistakes him for her dead husband.

The family is supposed to be odd and funny, but they're really not.  The father wanders around naked because he says that he can't work with clothes on.  This might make you titter the first time you see him, but the "joke" wears thin.  The sisters are all beautiful, but a bit flighty.  The mother is religious and keeps a priest who once asked her to marry him around for company.

While the movie starts off trying to be funny, around the halfway point it shifts gears when Granny goes missing.  The family heads to the old house she used to live in, because that's where she's gone in the past.  While there, Michael shares a couple of genuine dramatic  moments with her.  The scenes with him and her seem more real than any of the scenes he shares with any of the sisters.

The script seems as though it were written by an English Major who was trying too hard.  It's filled with literary and artistic allusions, but to no real purpose other than to include them.  Michael quotes William Faulkner and several times we are shown famous paintings, particularly Botticelli's 'Three Graces', which is obviously meant to represent the three sisters.  Rather than adding anything to the movie though, these references just come across as pretentious.  Other English Majors might get a thrill out of recognizing them all, but they do nothing to make this a better movie.

There are also elements of a male fantasy in the story.  All of the women in the house seem to lust after Michael as soon as he enters it.  He ends up in bed at one point or another with all of them except the mother who looks as though she'd like to be in there.  There are a few moments of nudity provided by the older sister Irenka and Gaby does a scene in just her bra and panties.

One of the final scenes in the movie involves a ghost which seems to come totally out of left field, as if the writer didn't know how to finish the story and so went with that idea.  It's actually one of the better moments in the movie, but there's nothing that came before it that prepares you for the possibility of a ghost appearing.

It finally wraps up with Michael and the naked father discussing woman and the writer saying (through the father) that he doesn't understand women.  It appears that he didn't understand how to write a good movie about them either.  The only novelty here is seeing a young Connelly and Dempsey together.

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