If a law were passed forbidding the production of dramas about people who have been screwed up by the death of a loved one, the world's film festivals would be forced to close down. I've seen at least three such films at Toronto so far, and the quality varies widely. It seems the grieving process is tricky to dramatize -- there's a fine line between enriching the viewers with cathartic drama and simply depressing them.

In the former category is Rachel Getting Married, which could also be titled Rachel's Sister Can't Get Her S*** Together. It's Rachel's wedding, but it's her sister, Kym (Anne Hathaway), who's drawing all the attention. Kym, a drug addict and alcoholic, has been in and out of rehab several times, with the most recent stint ending two days before her sister's big day. The girls once had a little brother; his death years ago was the source of some (but by no means all) of Kym's dysfunction.

As it turns out, Rachel Getting Married is indeed the right title, even though Rachel is not the protagonist of the story. That's the point: Kym cannot always be the center of the universe. The family -- which includes Bill Irwin as the girls' eager-to-please father and Debra Winger as their absentee mother -- can't be expected to drop everything and deal with Kym's drama every time she relapses. Eventually you have to grow up and take care of yourself.

It's a hard lesson to learn, but as directed by Jonathan Demme and written by Jenny Lumet, it's an easy movie to watch. All the performances are natural and unaffected, with realistic dialogue and many uncontrived funny moments -- the natural humor that emerges from any family's interactions, no matter how serious things are. Anne Hathaway is terrific, and so is Rosemarie DeWitt, who plays Rachel. The two relate exactly like sisters: fighting one minute, laughing at a shared memory the next, always loving each other underneath it all.

I was somewhat less fond of Genova, a well-made drama that I can respect but that I have no interest in ever watching again. This one stars Colin Firth as a newly widowed father of two girls -- teenager Kelly (Willa Holland) and younger Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) -- who moves the family to the title Italian city to teach at a university for a year. His hope is that the change of scenery will help the girls work through their grief.

Kelly, like Kym in the other movie, believes her emotional state is more important than her father's or sister's, and she starts cavorting with local boys and defying her father's rules almost immediately upon arriving in Italy. Mary, meanwhile, blames herself for her mother's death, has nightmares about it, and is often comforted by visions of Mom herself (played by Hope Davis).

The film deals with Mary's psyche more than anyone else's, but my problem with it is that it doesn't really "deal" with anything. There don't seem to be any character arcs -- where they are at the end doesn't feel much different from where they were when they started. Without some kind of resolution or catharsis, why inflict these people's sadness upon us, no matter how well acted it may be?

Finally we come to The Burning Plain, written and directed by Mexico's Guillermo Arriaga, whose screenplays for Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel are famous for their multiple storylines and nonlinear narratives. True to form, The Burning Plain (Arriaga's first feature as a director), introduces several sets of characters in three different time lines before gradually filling us in on how they're connected.

Charlize Theron plays an Oregon restaurant manager with what you might call low self-esteem. (She'll sleep with anyone, and she likes to cut herself.) In Texas or New Mexico or someplace like that, two families are grieving after one family's mother (Kim Basinger) and the other family's father (Joaquim de Almeida) died in a mobile-home fire while doin' it. In Mexico, there's a crop-duster and his little girl and another crop-duster.

Even though a lot of things happen in it -- arson, plane crashes, fistfights, sex -- The Burning Plain still manages to feel slow and uneventful, which you must admit is pretty impressive. It also feels contrived and melodramatic, like Arriaga threw together a bunch of domestic traumas and hoped we'd be moved by them, just because they're so "gritty" and "real." But I find the whole thing lifeless and dull instead. It might be time for Arriaga to try something new.

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Eric D. Snider is in Toronto for the festival. Check back later for more reports on what he's seeing.

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