In Her Shoes

Curtis Hanson directed it, Susannah Grant adapted Jennifer Weiner’s 2002 novel, and Ridley Scott is among the producers. Rose, played by Toni Collette, is a lawyer in Philadelphia. Maggie, played by Cameron Diaz, cannot hold a job, partly because of her dyslexia. Rose throws her out after catching her in bed with a colleague she had been seeing. In Florida Maggie finds Ella, the grandmother neither sister knew existed, played by Shirley MacLaine. There Maggie starts reading poetry aloud to a retired professor, and her dyslexia is fought at that table. The blind professor is Norman Lloyd, who acted for Hitchcock in Saboteur in 1942 and was 90 when this film came out. Weiner herself is in the cast, as a smiling woman in an Italian market. It screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2005. It opened third in North America with $10,017,575 and reached $83.7 million worldwide. MacLaine was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 63rd Golden Globes; Rachel Weisz won. Audiences polled by CinemaScore that opening weekend graded it A minus. A good fit if you want a slow drama tracing the distance between two sisters back to a secret the family kept. Not for anyone reading the poster as light comedy; the knot at the centre is their mother’s mental illness and suicide.