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Big cast can't lift small ideas in 'Fall to Grace'

A nagging Lifetime gooeyness hangs over the Austin-made feature "Fall to Grace," a multistory melodrama with big ambitions it hasn't the muscle to realize. It's a valiant effort that looks good and boasts promising performances, but the story and many of the characters feel embryonic, making their supposedly fateful intersections at best tenuous, at worst awkward.

Truly Indie 'Fall to Grace' 2 out of 5 stars The verdict: Fails to outgrow its awkward stage. Director: Mari Marchbanks Starring: Rene Alvarado, Ricardo Azulay, Cassidy Johnson, Gabriel Luna, Kira Pozehl Run time: 87 minutes Release date: June 16, 2006 Rating: Not rated; includes language, drugs, mild sexuality. On the web Official movie site Rate 'Fall to Grace'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

Because the characters are so thinly drawn, it's hard to recount who does what and why. It's a big cast, one of those carousels of characters that spin on an axis of fate that will have the various stories collide and interweave, something like "Crash," though not a fraction as intricate, combustible or compelling.

Each character is a pallid type you've seen before, if usually with more substance. There's teenage Kristofer (Gabriel Luna, with WB looks), an aspiring basketball player, and his struggling but willful father (Bhagirit Crow), who are Russian immigrants trying to find their place in American society, while keeping their thick, wavering accents under control. There's the spiteful married couple and their troubled, disaffected daughter (a winsome Kira Pozehl), her teenage friends, a couple of thugs and a simpatico cop. Unfortunately, there are also guns, the inorganic appearance of which don't fit the hazy suburban setting.

Writer-director Mari Marchbanks, a University of Texas film graduate, has a few vague ideas but doesn't seem sure what she's trying to say. She puts forth a soft, surfacey vision of human friction — a rote tangle of domestic, social and romantic conflicts — without a single original insight.

The quick-fix ending plays more like a screenwriter's escape hatch. After a crescendo of dramatic tension, "Fall to Grace" abruptly shifts to contrived, counterfeit optimism. It's not so much a fall to grace as a leapfrog to grace. The end is a group hug of implausible reconciliations and watery uplift — even the bad math student gets an A-minus on her test — that suddenly makes you think you're watching a completely different TV movie. If only.