REVIEW: Peep World Is Hardly Worth a Gander

Peek through the murky little window that is Peep World and you'll see lots of actors you know from TV: Michael C. Hall of Dexter, Rainn Wilson of The Office, Sarah Silverman of The Sarah Silverman Program, Lesley Ann Warren of In Plain Sight and Desperate Housewives. While it's nice to see TV actors get a crack at the bigger screen, Peep World barely seems like a movie. Withered and shrunken, it feels even too small for TV, especially when you consider that many of these actors have spent time on shows where the writing actually matters.

Peep World tells the story, laid out for us in smirky voice-over narration by Lewis Black, of a family in crisis. The patriarch of the Meyerwitz family, Henry (Ron Rifkin), is turning 70, and even though he doesn't particularly like any of his four children, he wants them around him on his big day. The oldest, Jack (Hall), is the most responsible but also the least successful -- his small architecture firm is going under, which is particularly bad news considering that he and his wife (played a sorely underused Judy Greer) are expecting their first child.

Then there's Cheri (Silverman), a failed actress and a persistent whiner. Joel (Wilson) is the family failure -- he's been trained as a lawyer but can barely function in the real world. The most successful member of the Meyerwitz clan is also the most unbearable: Nathan (Ben Schwartz, of Undercovers and Parks and Recreation) has written a novel that spills all the family secrets, and understandably, they resent him for it.

What's less understandable is why we should care about any of them. Peep World may as well be called The Not-So-Royal Tenenbaums, although the Meyerwitzes are hardly as colorful or as eccentric as that particular outfit. They are more sour, peevish and self-centered; they're also far less attractive. (The exception would be the foursome's mother the ex-Mrs. Meyerwitz, played by Warren, who has defied the gods of aging; she throws off almost as much sparkle as she did in that TV Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella some 45 years ago.)

We're supposed to feel the weight of the emotional damage the Meyerwitz kids have suffered, collectively and individually. But director Barry W. Blaustein (who made the gentle, if not particularly cohesive, 2005 comedy The Ringer) and writer Peter Himmelstein give their characters neither depth nor dialogue -- endless kvetching doesn't count. Jack is the most sympathetic. No matter how badly everyone else in his family behaves, he's always expected to hold things together, and Hall carries that burden believably: His anxiety seems to glow from within, as if it were the only life force keeping him going.

But Hall has to share screentime with everyone else, and because every character in Peep World is mewling for our attention, we're stretched pretty thin. The result is a kind of cacaphonous ennui. Silverman's Cheri is both unkempt and unbearable: We should be horrified when she cruelly rails against her mother, but I just kept wishing she'd comb her hair, or put on something other than a schleppy hippie dress. Nathan is a giant, bruised ego with legs attached, as well as the ability to type. Schwartz seems to be working hard to make him one of those not-so-bad guys who's also not exactly likable, but all he gives us is an indistinct, unpleasant blob. The big screen rejects Wilson like a bad blood-type match: It doesn't help that his character is barely sketched out, let alone written, but he's so bland, he's practically a negative presence.

Worse yet, Peep World wastes a crew of sturdy supporting actors like

Taraji P. Henson, Kate Mara and Stephen Tobolowsky (as well as the aforementioned Greer), inviting them to this big pity party and then giving them nothing to do. Then again, their characters come off better than the story's major players do; they're nice people, sometimes to the point of being pushovers. Maybe that's part of the point: Three of the four Meyerwitz are so wrapped up in themselves that they have nothing left to give anyone else. What better excuse to suck the life out of us?