["Crimes of the Heart"] is overlong, occasionally cliched and annoyingly frivolous at moments, but Henley keeps intriguing us with a delightfully wacky humor plus a series of little mysteries played out by characters we can never dismiss as superficial on a set that absorbs us into their lives.

Even the frivolity makes a point. There is enough hugging and squealing and jumping about among the MaGraths to recall with dismay a host of sorority films; but these frolics do reveal an immaturity which is almost crippling: Lenny, the eldest, plain. Jane frumpy, haunted by enormous self-doubt; Meg, a failed, pill-popping singer-swinger scared stiff of being "weak"; and Babe, whose very name signals her stage of development.

Meg has returned from Hollywood, where she suffered a breakdown, at Lenny's urgent request. Babe has shot her husband, a lawyer-politician who has apparently done all those things we expect of our...