THE INVISIBLE CIRCUS

Peter Keou

The turmoil of the '60s, the devastation suffered by the surviving family of suicides, the love between sisters -- all subjects barely touched by the movies. That remains the case with The Invisible Circus, Adam Brooks's insipid adaptation of the Jennifer Egan novel. It's a creaky pastiche of voiceover narration, period clichés, and half-hearted melodrama. Seven years after her then 18-year-old sister Faith (Cameron Diaz) committed suicide in Portugal in the summer of love in 1969, Phoebe (Jordana Brewster), herself now 18, decides to retrace Faith's hippie tour of Europe to find out what happened. She is, in just one of many tiresome double entendres on the name, looking for her lost Faith. What she finds along the way is Faith's old boyfriend Wolf (Christopher Eccleston, a fine actor but he just can't get over his embarrassment at his shoulder-length wig) and flashbacks to the '60s tinted like old Polaroids. Phoebe wants to relive the time when young people were "reinventing the world every day," which in Faith's case meant dumping feathers on diplomats and writing Phoebe postcards. Circus is a lightweight postcard of a movie, a reminder of how a generation that set out to change everything wound up entertaining itself with complacent inanities like this.