Available on DVD: “Harvest”

Robert Loggia and Barbara Barrie in Harvest

“The one thing in life that really matters is family.” So declares Siv Monopoli (Robert Loggia), the dying 83-year-old patriarch of a southern Connecticut clan, to his grandson Josh (Jack T. Carpenter), in Marc Meyers’s film Harvest. When feeling his oats, Siv, a burly World War II veteran with a guilty secret, likes to announce that he is “cooking with gas,” but now there is almost none left.

Siv’s family-first credo may have been heard countless times through the ages, yet when he voices it late in Harvest, it has an emotional weight that forces you to consider its relevance to your own life. In the end, is that where our final loyalties belong, no matter what?

During this meticulously written and exquisitely acted film, you come to sense the bonds and the wounds binding three generations of Monopolis, who definitely love one another, but with reservations. If Harvest didn’t convey the complex reality of kinship so forcefully, it might be dismissed as yet another dysfunctional-family drama, to use a noxious cliché that I vow from this day hence to banish from my critical lexicon. Aren’t all families dysfunctional in varying degrees?

The Monopolis’ woes — ailing grandparents, sibling rivalry, treachery and suspicion in money matters — are every family’s issues, especially at life-and-death turning points. They live in a sprawling house in Madison, not far from New Haven. Siv’s former line of work is never stated beyond the mention of his once having a shoe business. Although they live comfortably enough, they are clearly not rich.

Meyers’s screenplay is the stronger for not straining to explain the grubby details of the family’s history beyond what leaks out during conversations. When other relatives who have gone unmentioned suddenly show up, their peripheral appearances speak for themselves.

Instead of factual details, Harvest concentrates on the psychological subtleties of the family’s day-to-day interactions during a time of crisis. The quality of the ensemble acting is astonishing. Remarks, pauses and fluid facial expressions are so minutely expressive that you often feel that you are observing real people in real time. Sustaining this level of verisimilitude through an entire film is impossible, but Harvest comes closer than most.

Besides Siv, who fights decrepitude and illness with every ounce of will, we meet his fluttery, hollow-eyed wife, Yetta (UT-grad Barbara Barrie), whose worsening dementia requires constant attention; his sons, Benny (Arye Gross) and Carmine (Peter Friedman); and his divorced daughter, Anna (Dallas-born Victoria Clark). Hovering around the house is Yetta’s Mexican caretaker, Rosita (Adriana Sevan), who is distracted from her duties by her affair with Benny.

The film’s point of view is evenly split between Siv’s and Josh’s. Siv seesaws from bursts of energy (in one scene he rides a bike into town and orders a meal that is forbidden in his dietary regimen) to agonizing setbacks when his cancer acts up, and he is bedridden, moaning and raving.

Josh, Anna’s son, who returns from college for the summer, is inexorably drawn into the simmering war between Benny, who has never left home, and Carmine, a local politician. If the screenplay barely begins to explain their history of bad blood, which has to do with loans, debts, powers of attorney and competition for Siv’s favor, you feel its depth. Beyond exalting the primacy of family, Siv, now facing the end, has begun preaching forgiveness. Josh, seizing grown-up responsibility for the first time in his life, slyly inserts himself into the fray.

A gentle, reflective score by Duncan Sheik and David Poe weaves in and out of the movie and effectively evokes Josh’s introspective mood.

Harvest offers fair warning for viewers who haven’t been through the process that the final disposition of family property is often an ugly moment of truth, when decades of stored emotional baggage suddenly explodes.

Another explosion takes place when Josh’s girlfriend, Tina (Christine Evangelista), arrives in Madison unannounced and demands that he leave with her. At the same time, Josh confronts his mother about how he was forced to take her side in the breakup of her marriage. As Anna, a woman stretched to the breaking point, Clark gives an understatedly wrenching performance.

For all the tensions bared in the story, there are no cheap tricks. The line separating persuasive domestic drama and showy histrionics is never breached. If this isn’t King Lear or Chekhov, Harvest shows the truth of life as it is lived, growing messier and more complicated as the days dwindle and last chances loom.