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All Movie Info
Starring:
Alan Alda, Tom Aldredge, Dylan Baker, Jimmy Bennett, Matthew Broderick, P.J. Brown, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C.K., Virginia Madsen, Lois Smith, Jim True-Frost, Carolyn Baeumler, David Corbett, Brad Haugen, Joseph Kwasny, Mary Jo Mandula, Gentry Miller, Paul Mixon, Anthony Del Negro, Heidi Neurauter, David Martin Rose, Evan Shafran, Karla Strum, Bhavna de Montebello, Zsofia Otvos
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Diminished Capacity (2008)
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Movie Review by Jarrod 
August 6th, 2008
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'Diminished Capacity' stars Matthew Broderick as Cooper, a political journalist in Chicago who suffers a concussion and struggles with a temporary bout of short-term memory loss. This condition, popular in several movies, means that he has to jot stuff down in order to remember it. He will eventually recover and return to normal, but that is not the case with his uncle Rollie (Alan Alda), back home in Missouri, who is in a progressive stage of dementia and composes poems on a typewriter rigged with fishing wire; as fish tug at the baited hooks on the other end, certain keys are struck, and poetry emerges from the jumbled letters.
Cooper's mother Belle (Lois Smith) wants him to try and persuade Rollie to enter a health care facility, an idea to which he is resistant. Cooper reunites with ex-girlfriend Charlotte (Virginia Madsen), who is now suddenly single, and has a son. Rollie's prized possession is a vintage baseball card featuring Frank Schulte, from the 1908 Chicago Cubs; that was the year the Cubs won the World Series, so it is a worth a fortune, and Cooper, Rollie and Charlotte head for a sports memorabilia convention to find a buyer. There, they encounter two rival card traders, Mad Dog McClure (Dylan Baker) and the nasty Lee Vivyan (Bobby Canavale).
Mad Dog sounds like a more villainous name, but he is actually a fair and decent guy, very much unlike Lee. The film is adapted by Sherwood Kiraly from his own novel, and contains another solid Matthew Broderick performance, though he is not as amusing or as engaging as he was in Finding Amanda, though 'Diminished Capacity' is a slightly better movie overall. Cooper is a bit of a sad-sack, often looks withdrawn and depressed. Alan Alda is terrific, as the delightfully eccentric Rollie. Virginia Madsen shines in her best role since Sideways. The humor is subdued, to the point where viewers may simply not notice it, but there are plenty of references for die-hard Cubs fans, which are sure to be lost on those who know nothing about that particular team, or baseball in general.
This is not an emotionally potent or profound movie about coping with a relative's mental illness; if Rollie had Alzheimer's, and were married, there could have been a resemblance to Sarah Polley's highly acclaimed 2007 drama Away from Her, with Julie Christie. Cooper is concerned about his uncle, and obviously wants to do what is in his best interests, but is not really sure what that is. Baker and Cannavale come close to stealing the convention scenes, which are otherwise largely inconsequential; and far too much time is devoted tracing the fate of the card, which is threatened by a persistent thief, and by Rollie's tendency to lose it or misplace it.
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