Anthology movies are great when they tackle an interesting and complex central theme in the nuanced way that only varied different perspectives can. It's always risky, though; without a strong common thread, or when individual stories tread too much of the same ground, anthologies fail just as easily. 

With his latest film Father Mother Sister Brother, Jim Jarmusch lands with a thud in the second category. The director, still independent and now comfortably in his 70s, tells three stories over two hours that, despite their solid performances, totally fail to make a dent in our understanding of, or reflections about, what it means to be a family. No wonder several members of my audience left in the middle. 

Perhaps its biggest shortcoming is that all three sections of the film cover small, bland families that are neither impressively functional nor creatively dysfunctional. In "Father", adult children Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) visit their neurotic dad (Tom Waits) and chat groceries and utility payments. In "Mother", sisters Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps), who live in Dublin ostensibly to be close to their aging mom (Charlotte Rampling) but never see her, join her for their annual high tea. And in "Sister Brother", Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) reflect on their childhoods and worldly possessions soon after the sudden death of their parents in a plane crash.

Jarmusch's indie clout pulls together a really talented group of actors here. Driver and Bialik play good straight men to Waits' quietly zany old dude, especially as they establish their own mutual estrangement; Blanchett wears her turtleneck and spectacles as naturally as Krieps dons her rat-tailed pink hair, pairing as a good yin and yang across Rampling's tight Irish elitism; and Moore and Sabbat steal the show as cute, cuddly siblings showing real emotion in a movie mostly devoid of it. (Moore in particular had her moment in Pose on FX, but has been sorely missing from the screen since.)

But the actors can only do so much with some really shoddy material. There are purely expositional car scenes in each story, for example, with pairs of characters chatting while they drive against ugly visuals that often look like old-Hollywood rear projection. They explain their relationships with each other for us; they discuss their inevitably strained or distant relationships with their parents; they cite overly-specific stories from their pasts in ham-fisted ways. In these scenes and elsewhere, all three stories "tell" without "showing."

Throughout, Jarmusch overwrites his characters in an attempt to weave together shared themes. We can tell that Waits, as the "Father," isn't a great dad, so for him to reveal as much in the punch-line final scene of his story actually detracts from nuance. Ditto for Rampling's "Mother," who refuses to ask her kids any questions about their lives simply in an effort to communicate some greater point about parental alienation. With such boring material, these themes still don't connect, and far better films this season tell us oodles more about family. 

The only thing that is reliably shared is Jarmusch's penchant for parallel peculiarities, which entertains at first but gets annoying. Every character wears the same colors (a rare win for the costume design, otherwise disappointingly weak in a film literally produced by Yves Saint Laurent); a Rolex watch in each story makes the film feel like an advertisement; the phrase "Bob's your uncle" wasn't exactly a knee-slapper in the first story and really grates by the third; and rhetorical questions about whether you can toast with non-alcoholic beverages represents the most mundane small-talk that certainly does not bear repeating. As in his painfully morose Paterson (2016), Jarmusch's focus on déjà vu moments becomes a filmmaking gimmick.

Father Mother Sister Brother opens and closes with "Spooky", a fun little oddity of a song originally by Dusty Springfield and covered minimalistically by European singer Anika. "Would I like to go with you and see a movie?" she croons. If the movie in question is this one, the answer should be an emphatic "no."