Starring Andie MacDowell, Colm Feore, and Rupert Graves. Unrated.

With the Christmas contenders still coming up, it's too early to determine the best movies of 2007. But it's safe to say that there won't be anything worse than Intervention.

In essence, this utterly phony exercise in empty style details what happens when a big rock star (Britain's Rupert Graves, struggling with his Yank accent) is whisked from London to a ranchlike rehab run by a couple (Andie MacDowell and Colm Feore) who–wouldn't you just know it–have their own issues to work out. The rocker is met there by his screaming mimi of a wife (Jennifer Tilly) and the plastic blond girlfriend du jour (Baywatch babe Donna D'Errico). Some of the other vaguely sketched patients include a mopey romantic (Ian Hart) and another pop star (Kerry Fox) duking it out with her unreliable boyfriend (John Sessions, who has the best lines).

The colour-bleached film was directed and "devised"–which, presumably, means improvised in the Mike Leigh sense–by Northern Ireland's Mary McGuckian, who directed five previous features, all savagely reviewed, and none of which has seen wide release, despite having casts as worthy as what's found in this disaster.

I haven't caught her other work, including a recent remake of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but all of McGuckian's stuff has been faulted for brain-numbingly busy cinematography. The lensing here is so fussy, in fact, it's impossible to know what she is trying to say with her relentless movement and suffocating close-ups. The way the camera pokes around corners and through fence slats, it seems to implicate the viewer in a kind of seedy voyeurism. And yet the equally browbeating synthesizer music suggests pure melodrama.

There are some funny moments here, courtesy of ad-libbing that sometimes pays off, but there are no real insights into addiction, recovery, or filmmaking in general. (It's clear by the absurd finish, though, that cigarettes really are bad for your health.) In short, somebody should have the guts to talk to McGuckian before she does this again.

Link: Intervention at Pembridge Pictures