Guilt can be a powerful force. In The Perfect Family, it’s also a self-perpetuating one. Director Anne Renton’s film puts on display a woman so obsessed with her place in the afterlife that for a guarantee of absolution, she’s willing to engage in morally questionable activities that are bound to cause her even greater guilt.
If that sounds like a cutting critique of organized religion and situational morality, not quite: Renton’s approach is, to its benefit, fair and never strident. But it’s also gentle and cautious, often to a fault.
Eileen Cleary (Kathleen Turner) is a devout Catholic who goes to confession daily, delivers food to the elderly, holds the plate of Communion wafers for the parish priest and generally is about as involved as she can be in her church short of chucking everything and joining the convent.
For her labors, she’s been nominated for Catholic Woman of the Year. The prize will get her recognition at a church dinner, maybe a pretty plaque for the mantel. Most important, it comes with a personal prayer of absolution from a high-ranking visiting Irish archbishop. Eileen wants this assurance of forgiveness most of all.
But the reason for which she thinks she needs absolution is also her biggest roadblock to achieving the honor: She takes what she perceives as the failings of her family as spiritual deficiencies in her own character. Yet she needs that same family — including a husband (Mike McGrady) who’s a recovering alcoholic and adulterer, a son (Jason Ritter) who just left his wife and family for an older manicurist, and a daughter (Emily Deschanel) who is five months pregnant out of wedlock and lives with a woman who is more than just a roommate — to seem the perfect picture of church-approved bliss when the archbishop comes to visit.