Sometimes movie mothers scare me. I shuddered at Jane Fonda’s character in Monster-in-Law and hoped never to see a mom that obnoxious on screen again. However, my hopes shattered to smithereens while watching Diane Keaton in Because I Said So, a hard-to-take romantic comedy about a meddling mother trying to set up her daughter with Mr. Right.

Keaton plays Daphne Wilder, the long-widowed mother of three daughters -- two of them happily married, and the youngest, Milly (Mandy Moore) still single. Daphne feels her goal in life -- as she approaches her dreaded 60th birthday -- involves making sure Milly gets hooked up with someone she approves of, so she places an ad on the Internet explaining her goal. She picks one of the men responding (Thomas Everett Scott), who’s an up-and-coming architect, and arranges a way for him to meet Milly -- without her daughter knowing, of course. And she discourages a handsome musician (Gabriel Macht), who after overhearing Daphne’s interviews, becomes curious about Milly and finds a way to contact her on his own.     

As it turns out, both the architect and the musician fall for Milly in spite of her snorting laugh and incorrigible klutziness. Milly dates (and sleeps with) each of them,  the architect to please her mother and the musician to please herself. But when she finds out how her mother arranged everything, she’s furious -- and it takes her mom’s surprising romance with the musician’s father (Stephen Collins) to get their relationship back on course.

Although Keaton has turned in many wonderful performances in films like Annie Hall (for which she earned an Oscar), Reds, The Godfather and, yes, even Baby Boom, she fails to click here. It’s probably not all her fault though, for she gets plenty of help from the irritating story. Still, Keaton does too much shouting, too much fast talking, too much of everything. And Mandy Moore, who’s supposed to be a chip off the old block, is forced to imitate Keaton’s actions, which increases the film’s annoyance factor. Also, the mother-daughter conversations between Keaton and Moore come across as unreal, with one sounding so sexually graphic I felt relieved my daughter wasn’t watching this movie with me.

The only saving grace in Because I Said So is Gabriel Macht, who also impressed me earlier in A Love Song for Bobby Long. He manages to deliver another HIGHLY appealing performance here. In fact, he’s so yummy I think most viewers will find it hard to believe Milly would even look at another guy. Sigh.

(Released by Universal Pictures and rated “PG-13” for sexual content including dialogue, some mature thematic material and partial nudity.)