This Kevin Kline vehicle is as manipulative as hell - but the essentially conservative Life as a House offers something for Americans looking to be reassured about themselves and their beliefs. With its emphasis on family, freedom and pulling together during a crisis, Life as a House presses all the right buttons.

With advance talk of Oscar buzzing around it, Irwin Winkler's film plays like a male version of James Brooks' tear-jerking Oscar-winner Terms of Endearment. In the latter, Debra Winger dies of the dreaded Hollywood disease (wherein perfectly robust people contract fatal illnesses in order to facilitate the plot) and, in the process, brings her fractured family together. In Life as a House, Kevin Kline does pretty much the same thing.

Kline (who, as usual, is better than the material he has to work with) is George Monroe, failed architect, failed husband and failed father, who lives in a shack overlooking the Pacific and nearby Catalina Island on a glorious Southern California point. Seeing himself as a free spirit, George is fired from his job and diagnosed with terminal cancer on the same day (subtlety is not one of Hollywood's strengths). Self-examination ensues and George decides to fulfill a lifelong dream-building the house he's always talked about but never got around to actually constructing. In the process, he hopes to win the affection of his estranged, paint-sniffing, pill-popping 16-year-old son Sam (Hayden Christensen, poised for stardom as the young Darth Vader in the next two installments of the Star Wars saga).

Keeping his illness to himself (it's better, plotwise, to spring it on his family once they love him again), George, with recalcitrant son in tow, begins to tear down the shack and teach his son some valuable "life lessons." Soon, his son, his ex-wife Robin (the fine Kristin Scott Thomas who, despite a shaky American accent, remains the most beautiful, brainy 40-something actress working in English-language movies today) and his neighbours are all pitching in... Cue the sappy, overbearing music and let the tears begin to flow.

Implying that happiness is only achievable by re-uniting the nuclear family, Life as a House is a blatantly conservative piece of filmmaking, not a surprising fact when you realize that director Irwin Winkler is the 70-year-old responsible for producing Stallone's Rocky franchise. To its (partial) credit the film does try to highlight the problem of distant and destructive dads-George's father was also a bust as a parent, and Robin's current husband is well on the way to alienating his own sons-but in true Hollywood fashion it makes its points with a sledgehammer. For example, George's dad is not just a run-of-the-mill bad father; he's an alcoholic, wife-beating, child-abuser who killed George's mom and another innocent person in a drunk-driving accident.

Like I said, subtlety is not one of Hollywood's strengths, and its complete absence in Life as a House drags a workable premise to bathetic lows.