Safe Passage (1995)

In Passage Susan Sarandon plays a woman with an estranged husband (Sam Shepard) who every now and then goes inconveniently blind, and seven sons, one of whom is a Marine in Lebanon whose base is bombed during the Gulf War. While the family waits for news of casualties, family stuff happens: Sarandon interacts with the boys, the boys do brotherly things with one another, Sarandon beams her motherly-but-sexy (or maybe it's sexy-but-motherly) eyes on everyone around her. She's fine at this work — she's always fine — and the boys (particularly Robert Sean Leonard and Nick Stahl as the oldest and youngest) are a pleasant gaggle. But Deena Goldstone's story, directed by Robert Allan Ackerman, has all of the heft of a special, two-hour episode of Party of Five — a TV-shaped domestic drama overloaded with the kinds of emotions you see only on TV and never in your own family. B-