THIS LAKE IS ANYTHING BUT PLACID

Lake City is reminiscent of a lot of great, rarely seen films-from Come Early Morning to Raggedy Man-but the possibility that a movie will ever remind you of Lake City is slim to none. Filmmakers Hunter Hill and Perry Moore can't seem to agree on a tone for the film, which eventually results in a roulette wheel of genres. Don't like the small Southern town character study featuring Lucinda Williams' songs? A flick of the wrist, and you have a high-energy action movie about drugs, complete with cheesy action-movie music! Not interested in another movie about a dead child? How about an adult coming-of-age flick? All of these movies uneasily coexist under the umbrella title of Lake City-along with Rebecca Romijn as the world's most unlikely recovering alcoholic police officer-which is a shame because Sissy Spacek can be found wasting a genuinely affecting performance in this mess. As the mother of a wayward son (Troy Garity) who reappears without warning on her doorstep with emotional baggage, small child and drug kingpins in tow, Spacek wisely does very little-which gives force to what she does do. Both weary and edgy in the film's first scenes, her panic attack at the sight of a woman having a seizure on the grocery store floor is a triumph of minimalism. Unfortunately, she's saddled with a back story involving a pickup truck and a dead child; plus, there's a scenery-chewing cameo by Drea De Matteo as a drug-addled Hooters waitress. By the time an SUV is chasing her through a cornfield in the film's ludicrous climax, the tender and low-key moments of Lake City (including Keith Carradine as a concerned and besotted mechanic) are long forgotten. -- Lake City Directed by Hunter Hill & Perry Moore, Running Time: 92 min. --