There are unusual points of contact in our backgrounds, although I have never read any of the acclaimed fiction of Pulitzer Prize-winning Anne Tyler (Modarressi). As with other, often Southern Gothicky writers who also learned craft in the marvelous William M. Blackburn's writing courses at Duke University, her works, too, have been turned into successful films. A Slipping Down Life, from Tyler's 1969 novel of the same name (but with the compound adjective hyphenated), is not among them.

Début director-scriptwriter (sometime actress) Toni Kalem comes from HBO, particularly The Sopranos, and it shows in this awkward, wooden not even date-movie movie. As heroine Evie Decker, the usually admirable risk-taking Lili Taylor is woeful, aside from plain looking too old for her country-gal ingénue part and her partner -- actually only eight off-screen months younger -- and misplacing her hominy grits accent in places along the way.

Guy Pearce is Bertram "Drumstrings" Casey and beyond hunkiness has little going for him here, either, including the thirteen original songs he huskily "speaks out." Evie's widower father is ill, a fact unfairly kept from the audience until convenient, and Tom Bower self-effacingly slow talks and sleepwalks in the no-first-name rôle. Clotelia (Irma P. Hall) is an insulting stereotype, the gruff but loving Walkman'd black housekeeper who dispenses awful, common sense platitudes, while horny small-town hottie Faye-Jean Lindsay (Shawnee Smith) is similarly embarrassing chewing scenery to shreds.

Those few who are young and sensitive presumably want out of this North Carolina burg, where diversions are limited to flirting, drinking beer and dancing in roadhouses. So mild and prissy that "I could disappear and no one knows" and inept even as Kiddie Acres' rabbit-costumed wiener seller, motherless Evie seems the dutiful-daughter exception. That is, until surly Drumstrings is "on the air with Dick Dundaire" on local WWLV-AM. Bitten and smitten, with friend Violet (Sara Rue) she catches his act and, second time around, carves his surname in her forehead with broken glass. Looking in the mirror at the time, she does not realize that she does it backwards or that, as he notes, the letter-shorter "Drum" would have been less work and less pain.

Their act going nowhere quick, manager-drummer David Elliot (John Hawkes) hires the forehead-scarred woman to grace Drum's audience as a publicity gimmick. For a while it works, but Evie unaccountably turns out to be strong-willed and practical, so things must disintegrate before they can come back together again.

There will be realization, spur-of-the-moment marriage, a boorish Jack Daniels father-in-law, Evie as suddenly clueless homemaker and Drum as unfulfilled exterminator's assistant for No Nits, Ants or Bugs, early squabbles, unprepared-for death and the apparent crushing of youthful hopes. Success does not matter, dreams and determination do, as out of left field Evie asserts that "I've never backed down on anything in my life." Under the Milquetoast she is tough, and, the dream righted, a loaded black VW Beetle heads off, away to the future. Who knows, maybe to Nashville?

So many little bits are intended to be cute here, like an upside-down license plate -- specifically mentioned, lest viewers miss it -- but the movie is equally off-kilter and the jokes flat, the song's Southern style and hidden dance painful more than accurate. Obvious and trite, this movie is neither feminist nor funny, thoughtful or entertaining. 

(Released by Lions Gate Films and rated "R" for language including sexual references.)