“You’re forcin’ me to go all Lifetime Television for Women on ya now,” drawls the coach (Mark Povinelli) of the women’s basketball team that gives this movie its subtle title. To which the logical response is to drawl back, “Honey, that ship done sailed.”
You can take that as a warning, or the way I mean it, as a qualified compliment. Lifetime movies have their pleasures, and so does this film.
Chief among them is the cast, a group of over-45 actresses who really are better than ever; in the cases of Brooke Shields and Daryl Hannah, remarkably better.
Shields stars as a Texas housewife determined to save a mobile mammography unit by raising money via a charity basketball game against the high-school state champs. Joining her are Hannah as a closeted used-truck seller; Virginia Madsen, giving her all to the tart part; and Wanda Sykes as the town’s no-nonsense mayor, Florine. Camryn Manheim, as a pothead Harley-rider, has changed so little since “The Practice” that it’s spooky.
The trouble is an unimaginative script. The town is called Burning Bush; the campaign slogan of the mayor is “Go With the Flo.” One of the better lines is, unfortunately, “When she hears ‘hoedown,’ she hits the floor.”
Director Susan Seidelman, who captured the East Village so well in “Smithereens” and “Desperately Seeking Susan,” still knows how to create an authentic sense of place. She doesn’t condescend to small-town Texas. The same can’t be said of a plot that sees middle-aged women’s concerns as mostly mammograms and hormonal symptoms.