As setups go, this one is all right, I suppose, although even from the opening scenes of "Safe Passage" I feared, correctly, that the movie was going to be a long slog down familiar lanes. You pick up right away, for example, that the Singer family isn't really dysfunctional - not in the searing, painful way that families really can be. This is the kind of family whose troubles we'd all like to have, filled with characters like Patrick (Sam Shepard), the father, whose absent-minded ways and strange inventions have long bemused his sons, and Mag (Susan Sarandon), the mother, who talks about leaving home but who, we suspect, is fiercely possessive of her home and family, at a level beneath her fed-up complaints.
The sons, as they gather, are the kind of collection you find in fiction more readily than in life, each one representing a quickly grasped bundle of traits and quirks. There's Simon (Nick Stahl), the youngest, somewhat bedazzled by the houseful of verbal overachievers he was born into; Izzy (Sean Astin), next youngest, who has followed his father into science and follows him around adoringly; Alfred (Robert Sean Leonard), the oldest, wise in his own way, and engaged to a woman with children of her own; Gideon (Jason London), who blames himself for Percival's possible death - because Percival (Matt Keeslar) was the track star until Gideon beat him, and the Percival, on the rebound, joined the Marines. And the twins (Philip Arthur Ross and Steven Robert Ross), whose twinness is the defining thing about them.
The Singers live in a big old house with a basement and a garage and the possessions of nine people scattered willy-nilly. We get some glimpses into the ancient differences between the parents - the Shepard and Sarandon characters - which seem based on their conflicting needs to have a lot of space of their own, while simultaneously filling it with seven sons. And of course the screenplay is carefully constructed to allow each character scenes to establish himself, reveal himself, and have a personal crisis.
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