Despite there only being fifteen years between them, I actually thought that Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep made the mother/daughter thing work quite well here. The former, "Doris", is a wealthy and accomplished singer; the latter, "Suzanne", is a successful actress with dependency issues. Indeed they both have those - mum with the booze and her child with the pills. It's on the set of her latest film that director "Lowell" (Gene Hackman) lovingly loses the plot with his charge and makes it clear that she'd better clean her act up, else she'll be doing daytime medical soaps. Her insurers…