Movie review of "Who Gets the House?"

A family film without curse words? Without violence? Without smart-alecky kids who put each other or the grown-ups down? <br><br>These days when you think G-rated films, you think Disney. You think animation.

Friday, April 7th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

A family film without curse words? Without violence? Without smart-alecky kids who put each other or the grown-ups down?

These days when you think G-rated films, you think Disney. You think animation. You think songs and fairy-tales.

Feature Films for Families of Murray, Utah, is trying to change that perception with its latest feature, "Who Gets The House?," the story of four kids determined to reunite their separated parents.

It doesn't tread new territory. The idea of kids trying to get parents back has been done and redone as recently as "The Parent Trap." And here, looking at the well-appointed suburban home, one can even compare the gulf of communication eroding the marriage to the black hole at the heart of "American Beauty."

Except in this case the alienated daughter not only doesn't go out with the drug dealer next door, she also turns down an invitation to a dance with the hunkiest guy on the football team (nicknamed T-Rex) because after asking her parents' permission, she accepts their decision that she's too young to date.

And the director, Timothy Nelson, eschews poetic metaphors like falling rose petals, in favor of kitchen-sink realism. The closest we get to symbolism is that the house, like the marriage, is in the process of being remodeled.

Don (Carl Marotte) and Rebecca Reece (Sophie Lorain) aren't even talking to each other as they face their 16th anniversary. When Don arrives to relieve his wife with the kids, Rebecca whizzes out.

It's a rushed life of take-out meals and colliding schedules. When Jennifer (Fatuma Kayembe) tries to advise her friends, the Reese kids, that she sees their parents' marriage taking the same divorce route her parents' did, they don't believe it.

But when Jennifer uses the resources of her father's law office to draw up a paper giving the kids the house â€“ just in case â€“ the kids take it. And when the inevitable happens, Brian (Ricky Mabe), Emily (Elisha Cuthbert), Heidi and Amy (Emma and Sally Isherwood), tell their parents if they can't get along, the parents will be the ones to have two homes â€“ not them.

The performers are appealing, without any star turns. Similarly, there's humor, but not the laugh-out-loud kind.

In fact, the film is marred only by a complicated â€“ though intriguing â€“ twist in which Brian devises a communication machine that involves so much technical expertise, one only hopes it won't make kids whose parents do divorce feel as if it's their fault for not being good enough with electronics.

Forrest S. Baker III, founder and CEO of Feature Films for Families, began his company in 1989 as a way of offering families an opportunity to see the kind of G-rated live-action films that are not usually available in theaters or on video.

"Who Gets the House?" fits in with that mission. Like the tortoise, it may not be the fastest or the funniest in the race to the box office, but it has a sweet spirit that may help it cross the finish line into the heart of the family audience.