Yet again, we ventured to the movie theatre, ready for a break from reality, ready to digest yet another film together and hopefully emerge with contented grins on our faces. However, I think this movie was the least satisfactory so far this fall.

Most movies contain metaphors, but Life as a House is a metaphor that contains a movie. There’s a prefabricated construction to this movie that prevents it from acquiring the emotional solidity it needs to stand out. Neither of us were too enthusiastic about the whole ordeal. OK, so a mean, terminally ill guy rips down his shabby house and builds a beautiful new one, with his son. Do you get it? ’Cuz see, he had this nasty old house, just like his nasty personality and then he . . . oh, whatever.

Starring Kevin Kline as George and Kristin Scott Thomas as Robin, this manipulative wallow in suburban angst shamelessly steals from American Beauty, which earned great acclaim and, more importantly, made lots of money in 1999. Beyond the obvious premise and the fact that Kline is yet another poor, privileged white-guy hero, the movie has its virtues. For one thing, both Kline and Scott Thomas are reliably good.

Sixteen-year-old Sam (Hayden Christensen, soon to become world-famous as young Anakin Skywalker in “Star Wars Episode II”) is fiery and honest as Kline’s son: a pierced wastrel who blossoms conveniently when his pop pays attention to him. Seemingly angered and alienated solely as a consequence of listening to too many Marilyn Manson records after the divorce of his biological parents in Perfectville, Calif., Sam’s character is rather cliché.

Having upset the otherwise perfect lives of his mother, his emotionally amputated stepfather and their two young sons, Sam is forcefully taken in for the summer by his father, George. He is an architect who has just been fired for paying too much attention to detail and not enough to the big picture, and he agrees with his ex-wife on only one issue: Sam’s face piercing and make-up has to go.

The summer goes by with father and son arguing and fighting over drugs, work and piercings, while tearing down their old house and building a new one in its place. The neighborhood is like a little “Days of our Lives” in itself, with all its intrigues and hidden shames, and that’s what makes this movie so over the top and so wannabe to us. We do not deny the fact that all these things could have happened. It’s just that seeing it all in one single movie during the course of two and a half hours makes you think they just wanted to cram in as much shit as possible to make it extra Hollywood-esque. I mean, seriously, drug abuse, prostitution, unemployment, fatal diseases, child molestation, ex-spouses falling in love again, mother screwing daughter’s friend, gay-not-gay? son hates father x two generations … ugh.

All the moral issues in the movie also bothered us immensely, such as when Sam is “rehabilitated” from his stage of confused sexuality and forced to stop wearing makeup and encouraged to sleep in a girl’s arms. Sorry guys, that’s just not good enough for us. Even more revealing of the movie’s moral outlook is the way the plot pivots at the end around the sexual transgression of one of George’s neighbours. He’s a vaguely prissy and high-strung businessman who has been the butt of jokes throughout the movie. George’s dog can’t stand him. Of course, he’s gay. In the filmmakers’ world view, that means we’re not supposed to like him, either.

At the end of the movie, this is what we’re left with: tell everyone you love them, you never know how long you’ll live; seize the day; forget about being gay, only bad-assed teenage drug addicts have that delusion so shower with a girl and you’re cured, son; spend a summer with your dad, and all your pubescent worries will go away; never remarry for money, you’ll miss the love you had with your first husband; don’t sleep with your daughter’s 16 year old classmate mom, it will upset your daughter and make for a bad example …

Life as a House is cynically calculated to make you cry, and there are moving moments here, but they’re external to the movie. They occur when images make you think about your own relationships, rather than the ones on-screen.

That’s not bad. Any way a movie affects us is worthwhile, but Life as a House feels like a diluted American Beauty, without the intelligent, witty humor. There’s just no room for oddness in this movie (for instance, isn’t it possible for a kid to be pierced and nice?).