It’s all so confusing that I found it next to impossible to keep up with who’s who, how they’re related to each other, and why—and I found the script too baffling and sentimental to care.

The emotions about the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters are spot on, and there’s no shortage of star power. But there’s an insistently dour fog over the proceedings, and the film feels subdued and sedated without the levity to brighten up things.

Mothers and Daughters is drabness on the screen personified, a “Lifetime Original Movie” too unoriginal for Lifetime to want anything to do with it.

Because so few movies focus on stories about women, it’s incredibly frustrating to see this strong cast drifting away on a tide of soap bubbles — there’s no movie here, just scene after scene of melodramatic cliché.

The film feels like a long succession of incidents that tend to climax in familiar platitudes or weary declarations of the “I can’t handle this!” variety.