The late, great Roger Ebert once called Lawrence Kasdan’s 1988 drama The Accidental Tourist, the most delightful film of the year, but “also seemingly one of the most depressing.” That’s an accurate description of this gentle and sympathetic comedy about a man mourning the loss of his son. Kasdan’s film is so impossibly well-managed tonally that one finishes it in a kind of daze. Scenes of purely human comedy and tragedy with a tempo as relaxed and unpredictable as life itself play against the backdrop of a story about grief and, in some ways, coming back to the land of the living.
Kasdan, the great filmmaker behind 1983’s The Big Chill and 1991’s Grand Canyon, is the reason for this expertly executed tightrope walk. Adapted from Anne Tyler’s novel of the same name, the film follows Macon Leary (William Hurt), an author of travel guidebooks whose marriage to Sarah (Kathleen Turner) is slowly disintegrating a year after the murder of their son Ethan. Ethan was the lone victim of an armed robbery, and Macon is still haunted by the fatherhood of which he was cheated by total chance. To put the nail in the coffin, Sarah announces one morning that she is leaving Macon and has rented an apartment in the city.
The set-up perhaps doesn’t pass the smell test of comic potential, but as scripted by Kasdan and Frank Galati, the movie is a comedy about people rather than their situations. We chuckle and smile upon recognizing the natures of these characters and their witty and sometimes sardonic interactions, but we aren’t meant to guffaw at slapstick or scatology. Simply through the performances by Hurt and Turner, and Geena Davis as another significant character (as well as Amy Wright, David Ogden Stiers and Ed Begley Jr. as Macon’s idiosyncratic siblings), we fall into the unique and downright huggable rhythms of these people. This is most apparent in the first encounter between Macon and Muriel Pritchett (Davis), the canine trainer whose kennel boards Macon’s dog Edward when Macon must take one of his trips to write a new guidebook.
The chemistry between Macon and Muriel – between Hurt and Davis – is palpable right from the start, though the grieving Macon is unable to see it. We notice Muriel’s eyes and demeanor, though, immediately drawn to this handsome man and taken by his manner of speaking and his pure emotional honesty. In his grief, the man has let his guard down a little, and Hurt does an enormously effective job of differentiating the character’s interactions with this woman, whom he likes and is amused by but does not know, and with Sarah, whom he knows very well but no longer feels any connection to.
Davis, in an Academy Award-winning performance, is phenomenal in her reading of Muriel as a woman who falls quickly and desperately in love with this sad-eyed and bewildered man, technically abusing her position as his dog’s temporary caretaker to check in on Edward after their business relationship has ended and taking it upon herself to invite him to dinner. The relationship blossoms – not out of a sense of falsely romantic hullabaloo but out of a necessity on the part of these people, both having recently undergone divorces, to connect with another human. Almost serendipitously, then, Macon and Muriel have found each other.
As follows with the unpredictability of life, the movie has surprises in store – among them being the fact that romances can move more like rollercoasters than straight paths. Macon and Sarah reconcile after a realization of each person’s priorities, and they later fall apart again, not because the story needs them to but because the characters seem so real, so genuine, and so fragile. We come to realize that Macon and Muriel would have been better served to be together for as long as Macon and Sarah have, but through coincidence that places the latter pairing in their home once more, the characters also receive an opportunity to learn that lesson in a hard, truthful way.
In case one hadn’t realized just yet, The Accidental Tourist is not really driven by plot, though a pair of events does cause a minimal amount of drama as it enters its final third. A back injury handicaps Macon on his trip to Paris, where Muriel and Sarah (unbeknownst to each other) have followed him in order to win him back and to be his caregiver, respectively. This leads not to false drama or histrionics but to another hard truth for everyone involved. It’s also followed by a final scene that, with a nod and a reciprocated smile (and, for what it’s worth, almost no dialogue), perfectly caps a gentle, honest comedy about fundamentally good, flawed people.
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