Ìý User Rating 
It begins with Kevin Kline wearing nothing but his Y-fronts as he urinates over the cliff into the sea... and it doesn't get any better. Irwin Winkler's tearjerker about one man's mid-life crisis is an unbelievably insidious film about the necessities of tough-love, hard work and fitting in.
After getting sacked from his 20-year job as an architect, middle-class, middle-income George decides to rip down the old shack he's been living in on the coast and build the dream house he's always wanted. To help him with the construction he drags along his teenage son Sam (a quietly effective Christensen), who's been driving his mother and stepfather to distraction with his Goth clothes, ring piercings, drug-taking and confused sexuality. The scene is set for a typically predictable melodrama.
Yet what makes "Life as a House" so remarkable is its disturbing subtext about Sam's return to the fold. Instead of just letting this boy grow out of his adolescent angst, the movie supports the kind of high-handed tough-love that's designed to beat every single subversive impulse out of the young teenager.
It's a depressingly right-wing film, full of pious sentiments about family values, the joys of heterosexuality (Sam's potential gayness is handled in way that suggests not being straight is on a par with glue-sniffing) and the importance of parents as authority figures.
As a lesson on the importance of family togetherness that divorce-ridden America needs to tell itself, "Life as a House" is fascinating, but as a drama it's insipid, maudlin junk that'll have you reaching for the sick-bucket rather than the Kleenex.
