Two Weeks

The harrowing indignity of watching a loved one fade at the hands of a terminal illness gets a vivid look in Steve Stockman’s soul-scratching melodrama. It’s hoky in construct, and the attempts at comic relief misfire, but overall it touches. Much of that’s because it has two-time Oscar winner Sally Field as Anita Bergman, the reflective matriarch stricken with cancer. Her children — some with offspring themselves — descend on the North Carolina homestead for what amounts to a living funeral. Thomas Cavanagh and Ben Chaplin are the older brothers from opposite coasts and philosophies; Glenn Howerton fills in as the nondescript younger one, and Julianne Nicholson gives the film its other standout performance as the dutiful daughter obsessed with how-to manuals on dealing with the dying. The unenviable ordeal gets a little too Lifetime at turns; still, the performers, and their characters’ all-too-real flaws, carry it beyond treacle.