SUNSHINE STATE

A traditional, highly diagrammed, overwritten, underdirected ensemble story from filmmaker John Sayles about a disappearing way of life, this time set in northern coastal Florida. The storytelling is becalmed, but Edie Falco is bracing as a bedraggled local who has stayed put (running her father’s motel) when she should have left; Angela Bassett plays an alienated native who left as a pregnant teen and is due to return, by Saylesian symmetry, for reconciliation with her hard-to-please mother (Mary Alice).