THE DAYTRIPPERS (Directed by Greg Motolla. Starring Parker Posey, Live Schreiber, Hope Davis, Pat McNamara, Anne Meara). Amusingly offbeat, with a nice balance of humour and pathos, The Daytrippers could qualify as a more low-key cousin to last year’s Flirting With Disaster, although it’s somewhat less frenetically-paced and considerably more muted in tone.

Suburban housewife Eliza (Hope Davis)

discovers a suspicious love letter in her absent husband’s drawers, and is easily persuaded by the rest of her family to drive to New York to confront him. The journey mutates slowly but surely into an unrelenting avalanche of petty arguments and ill-advised little detours, with Eliza’s quietly-spoken father (McNamara)

stuck behind the wheel throughout, saddled with the unenviable company of his sulky

student daughter (Posey) and her hilariously pretentious boyfriend (Schreiber).

His overbearing motor-mouth of a wife is unforgettably played by Anne Meara, whose performance as the domineering matriarch (heard by all, respected by nobody) is so supremely-judged, and so teeth-grindingly annoying, that you won’t know whether to applaud or hurl broken bottles at the screen. This woman is among the most memorable characters to bestride a screen this year,

yammering on so incessantly – and in such

an intensely irritating manner – you might be tempted to take a long lie-down afterwards. Parker Posey sports a suitably exasperated expression on her face throughout, while Liev Schreiber impresses hugely as her philosophy-spouting art-school boyfriend.

The Daytrippers is a penetratingly, painfully insightful deconstruction of the affluent American middle-class nightmare – and yet

for precisely that same reason, it grates on

the nerves occasionally. The protagonists are not exactly people you would be inclined to accompany on a long car journey, and even

at a compact 87-minute running time, the film doesn’t under-stay its welcome. There is much to admire about The Daytrippers, nonetheless, and the conclusion is particularly surprising – if there’s nothing especially revelatory or life-affirming about it, it’s an earnestly-acted and lovingly-directed little film with enough warmth and wit and honesty at its centre to stand comparison with The Ice Storm.