It's 1969 Morrison, Alabama. The Caldwell clan has 3 brothers Skip (Billy Bob Thornton),Carroll (Kevin Bacon),Jimbo (Robert Patrick),sister Donna (Katherine LaNasa),and patriarch Jim (Robert Duvall). The men are all veterans of various wars. When Jim's ex-wife and mother to the 'kids' die, her present husband Kingsley Bedford (John Hurt) and the Bedford family Phillip Bedford (Ray Stevenson),Camilla Bedford (Frances O'Connor) comes over from London to bury her back home in Alabama. The two families try to deal with the estranged relationships against a backdrop of volatile outside world of Vietnam and inner worlds. Jim is fascinated with car crashes. When a nearby town has a side show displaying Jayne Mansfield's car that she died in, Jim Caldwell takes Kingsley Bedford along for a look.

This movie is jam packed with great actors but they keep getting into each other's way. Writer/director Billy Bob Thornton lets this assemble of talents go off on their own and loses any structure or narrative. There is a lack of clarity. It needs to tell us clearly that the kids aren't actually related early and often. There is also a plodding pace to it all. They are moseying along and every once in awhile, there is an amazing scene between some of these great actors. The movie is just too uneven with the splintered groups garnering different levels of interest.

Terrible title as it has little to do with the movie and a terribly tepid film directed and jointly written by Billy Bob Thornton.

Robert Duvall is Jim Caldwell. A Great War veteran and a patriarch of a well to do Alabama family in the late 1960s, who spends his time visiting automobile accidents which the local police are happy to oblige him with.

Duvall has three sons who served in World War 2. Skip (Billy Bob Thornton) and Carroll (Kevin Bacon) seem to spend their time drinking beer, smoking dope and arguing. Both have to deal with the scars of the war. Bacon is the wild one, even though he has a son at college, he is anti Vietnam war protester and regularly gets in trouble with the police that upsets his father. The conservative Jimbo (Robert Patrick) seems to to be only responsible one. Their sister Donna is married to an ex football star but seems to be promiscuous.

The Caldwell's meet the Bedford family from England. The reason being that Jim's former wife has died and wants to be buried in Alabama. She has been living in England and was married to Kingsley Bedford (John Hurt) and he is accompanied by his two grown up children from his first marriage.

Of course there is some hesitancy between the two families because of the strained past but as they get to know each other we find out that Hurt's children are also have a dysfunctional relationship with their father which results in the daughter getting involved in some kinkiness with Skip and the son having a liaison with Donna.

The film is a shambles, it kind of rambles without much focus. There is some good acting especially from Duvall and Hurt whose characters bond as they go to see Mansfield's wreck in a store. However the film itself is a bit of a car crash.

I don't know, I kind of liked this picture even if it does seem to ramble it's way along with a host of disconnected scenes. It's got a stellar cast, and does a fairly good job of demonstrating the dysfunction within two disparate families from opposite sides of the Atlantic. Robert Duvall portrays the redneck patriarch of the Caldwell clan, left to pick up the pieces of a failed marriage some twenty years earlier when his wife left for a life of adventure and wound up marrying a Brit. Her dying wish was to be buried back home in Alabama, thus instigating a clash of cultures that nevertheless has a way of slowly bonding the individual members to each other in different ways. The 'Jayne Mansfield' connection to the story is tenuous at best, as the dead actress's car winds up at a local auto show to be admired by an adoring public. Given the title, it might have been a good idea to cast Mariska Hargitay for the picture, but that wasn't the case (you can look it up). Perhaps the oddest character in the story was portrayed by Ron White, as all he had to do was a version of his stand-up routine and he was home free. The guy can be caustic and uproariously funny all at the same time. The oddest thing for me to wrap my head around was the idea that Billy Bob Thornton, Kevin Bacon and Robert Patrick are about the same age, and would all be young enough to be Robert Duvall's progeny. At eighty nine as I write this, he's still my favorite modern day actor.