AllMovie

HBO's popular franchise of woman-centric omnibus melodramas continues with this second installment, which boasts a gaggle of big-name talent and an similarly outsized earnestness that ultimately sinks the entire project. Audiences are best-advised to leave If These Walls Could Talk 2 after its first segment, writer-director Jane Anderson's touching "1961," since nothing that follows approaches the depth of feeling or complexity of character put forth by Anderson and lead Vanessa Redgrave. Though Redgrave's Edith has a limited amount of screentime opposite her longtime companion Abby (Marian Seldes), the actress manages to convey a profound sense of grief at her lover's loss, one that gives way to an even more heartbreaking and understated resignation. As Abby's family intervenes in dividing up her estate, Redgrave and Anderson handle what could have been clichéd, routine scenes of discrimination with delicacy and realism. The same can't be said of Martha Coolidge's hackneyed lesbian after-school special, "1972," which boasts haltingly awful, topic-sentence dialogue that isn't excused by the fact that the characters speaking it are part of a militant campus women's-lib group. The film culminates with a regrettable they're-having-a-baby vanity project directed by Anne Heche and starring her then-girlfriend Ellen DeGeneres; their ostensible stab at domestic comedy only underlines how low the film has stooped from its opening salvo.