Inventing the Abbotts (1997)

Inventing the Abbotts is a 1997 romance film directed by Pat O'Connor, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Billy Crudup, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly, and Michael Keaton. The screenplay by Ken Hixon is based on a short story by Sue Miller. The original music score is composed by Michael Kamen. The film is marketed with the tagline "When you want it all but can't have it, there's only one way to handle life... invent it."

The lives of two closely linked families dangerously intersect in a small Illinois town in the 1950s. Basic plot is about two brothers--Jacey and Doug Holt--growing up in Haley, Illinois, sons of a working single mother. As the movie progresses, we find out that their father, a reckless risk-taker, has lost his life via a bet with Lloyd Abbott, his business partner. Abbott eventually becomes the town's foremost, wealthiest and most-admired citizen. The lives of the Holts and the Abbotts are intertwined through various entanglements which we discover later in the film. Lloyd Abbott and his distant wife, Joan, are the parents of three beautiful daughters, Alice, Eleanor and Pamela. Because of a misunderstanding of the circumstances surrounding his father's death (a supposed bet with Abbott that took the elder Holt's life), Jacey (Billy Crudup) seeks revenge on the Abbotts through the calculated seduction of the Abbott daughters. At first, Jacey cannot wait to escape the suffocating life in Haley; later in the film, however, he is pulled back as he idolizes the Abbott family, and obsesses about the oldest daughter, Alice, thus seeking to jockey his way into the Abbott family. At first, Doug (Joaquin Phoenix), the younger brother, admires and worships his brother's libertine lifestyle. However, as he matures, he discovers that all that glitters are not gold. He eventually falls in love with the youngest, virginal Abbott, Pamela (Liv Tyler), who protests his early, fumbling sexual advances, and she forces him to appreciate her for who she is, not what she may offer up to him. Meanwhile, Eleanor is sent away to a mental asylum after she and Jacey are caught by Lloyd Abbott, who cannot keep them apart. After two years of being apart from each other, Doug and Pamela meet again by chance while they are in college in Philadelphia. However, Doug and Jacey are brought back to Haley after their mother's death. They also find a letter from their late father that says he has sold their patent for a 1937 DeSoto Coupe convertible. Despite the obstacles that Lloyd Abbott places in the way of any of the Holt brothers ever seeing his daughters again, Doug convinces Abbott at the end of the story of his true love for Pamela and receives his blessing on a future relationship.