["Crimes of the Heart"] is loaded and perhaps overloaded with quirky, casually outrageous, Mississippi-Gothic misbehavior. As I watched the three MaGrath sisters reassemble for the 30th birthday of one and for the impending death of the grandfather who'd long cared for them, I found myself often grinning at what might have been gruesome, sometimes cocking my head sharply to catch a rueful inflection before it turned into a comic one, and always, always admiring the actresses involved. I also found myself, rather too often and in spite of everything, disbelieving—simply and flatly disbelieving. Since this is scarcely the prevailing opinion, I'd best be specific.

Take a case in point. [Babe is] … the only one of the three who's married, and at the moment she's most decidedly stealing the limelight from the aging birthday girl, [Lenny],… and from [Meg],… the pop singer who didn't make it and wound...