The Accidental Tourist
Lawrence Kasdan (1988)
Macon Leary (William Hurt) is a successful writer, the author of travel guides for businessmen – the ‘Accidental Tourist’ series. A year ago his young son Ethan died in appalling circumstances, killed by a gunman who walked into a burger bar. On his return home to Baltimore after a research trip, Macon’s wife Sarah (Kathleen Turner) tells him she can’t cope with the loss of Ethan or continue to live with Macon. An early practical problem for Macon after Sarah’s moved out is finding kennels for the Learys’ Welsh corgi: first and foremost Ethan’s dog, Edward has grown increasingly temperamental in the last year and is blacklisted by the last place he stayed. Macon chances upon the Bow Meow centre, where he meets tall, toothy, vivid Muriel Pritchett (Geena Davis). Muriel accepts Edward; she also shows an immediate interest in Macon. Not long afterwards, he breaks his leg in a domestic accident involving Edward and goes to convalesce with his three unmarried siblings in the family house they still share; when Edward gives Macon a nasty bite, he decides the dog needs behavioural counselling and Muriel, a dog trainer, re-enters the picture. From that point on, The Accidental Tourist is principally about the relationship between Macon and Muriel – whether she can bring him back to life as successfully as she helps Edward mend his ways.
I’ve read but I don’t remember anything about the Anne Tyler novel on which the screenplay, by Lawrence Kasdan and Frank Galati, is based. Kasdan veers between a tone of sluggish mournfulness and – perhaps an overcompensation for that – humorous bits in which he tends to direct the cast to play too broadly. Both aspects of the film’s split personality (which are never satisfyingly fused) are evident very early on. An exchange between Macon and the fat man (Bradley Mott) next to him on the flight back to Baltimore, with both actors overdoing it, is followed by Sarah’s big scene with her husband – in their bleak kitchen, with rain beating on the windows and rumbles of thunder on the soundtrack. The dialogue here is essentially intelligent but it’s overexplicit – and anticipates more of the same, whenever someone speaks her or his mind. It also soon becomes clear that the extracts from the ‘Accidental Tourist’ guides, which William Hurt reads in rather dull voiceover, are going to comment wryly (but nonetheless obviously) on Macon’s own fearful approach to living.
Hurt was good in the previous year’s Broadcast News but his work here raises doubts about more than a flair for comedy. His attempts in that department – humorously horrified double takes for the most part – are awkward but the shortcomings of the performance go deeper and damage the whole picture. There’s an implication that Macon is innately grumpy but that that quality has been grievously aggravated by Ethan’s death: Hurt doesn’t get at the different layers of Macon’s gloom – at any kind of distinction between the congenital killjoy and the grieving father. He just seems fed up: apart from the evidence that he loved his son, there’s next to no suggestion that Macon got much out of life before Ethan died and it’s hard to believe that he and Sarah had the happy marriage which is supposed to have been wrecked by their shocking bereavement. A more serious problem is that you can’t understand what Muriel – a working class single parent with a physically fragile son (Robert Gorman), living in a rundown area of Baltimore – sees in Macon either. The idea that this self-centred, snotty man is a bigger challenge to Muriel’s determined tenacity than any of the recalcitrant canines she’s got to grips with sounds fine but Macon isn’t likeable and doesn’t have any other quality that would make the challenge irresistible. This makes the climax to the story, with both Muriel and Sarah hotfooting it to Paris in their attempts to win his love, pretty ridiculous. Macon continues to treat Muriel abominably until the shoddy moment when he sees a boy on a Paris street who reminds him of Ethan: this brings on an epiphany and Macon decides to live happily ever with Muriel. Playing a shallow, self-confident charmer in Broadcast News, Hurt managed to make himself glamorous but his impenetrable glumness here has the opposite effect. Dustin Hoffman would have been too old to play Macon and his lack of inches, given the height of Geena Davis (and Kathleen Turner), would have been physically funny in a distracting way. But the nasal, strangled voice that Hurt uses brings Hoffman to mind and makes you feel that someone like him – someone, that is, who could make Macon infuriating but infuriatingly charming – was needed for the role.
Hurt’s acting may be a disappointment but Kathleen Turner’s Sarah is something worse, even if this is primarily the fault of the script. After the opening scene with her husband, Sarah disappears for an hour or so. Her return is not dissimilar to that of the prodigal mother in Kramer vs Kramer – except that here the avenging angel, because it’s her husband’s love affair with another woman, rather than father and son bliss, that has to be interrupted, behaves like a femme fatale. Turner – probably trying to mask her understandable confusion about what she’s meant to be doing – overplays both these contradictory presentations of Sarah. The screenplay is very unfair to her: when she tells Macon they can’t go on together, she says that life without Ethan is so unbearable that she’s thought of suicide; when she returns (like Joanna Kramer, Sarah seems to have ‘found herself’ during her sabbatical), she doesn’t mention Ethan – and there’s nothing in either the writing or in what Turner shows us to indicate that Sarah is suppressing talking about him. The closest she gets to speaking Ethan’s name is when she resentfully asks Macon if the ‘little boy’ was what attracted him to Muriel. Macon had suggested in their opening exchange that they might have another child, a possibility from which Sarah recoiled vehemently. When she reappears and tells Macon she’s changed her mind, Kathleen Turner’s coming on strong gives the impression that it’s a renewed sexual relationship with her husband that she’s after – with a baby as a possible by-product.
William Hurt’s best moment is when he arrives at Muriel’s house, intending to put a note through the door refusing her invitation to dinner (she makes a persistent play for him) but finding himself face to face with her. As he explains himself, she doesn’t say a word; as he gets upset, she pulls him through the door and holds him as he cries on her shoulder. This is the highlight of Geena Davis’s performance too – Muriel’s sudden silence, as she listens to Macon then holds him, contrasts very effectively with her habitual chatter. Davis, the surprise winner of a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this, is very likeable throughout; it’s largely thanks to her that you retain some interest in the main story (although she has her work cut out – this two-hour film could afford to shed twenty minutes). I didn’t, though, like the way that Kasdan, right from the start, shoots Davis in a way that underlines too strongly that Muriel is a breath-of-fresh-air/ray-of hope. This has the effect of making her kooky quality too salient: it seems practised – at least until the point at which we can see more of the insecurity behind Muriel’s cheery bravado.
There are things to like about the dialogue, including some good one-liners. I believed the way that (I hope intentionally) the main characters used each other’s names in their conversations in inverse proportion to how close they were feeling. (In other words, Macon and Sarah append ‘Sarah’ or ‘Macon’ to nearly every sentence when they’re feeling remote from one another.) Although Kasdan’s treatment of the subplot centred on Macon’s brothers Porter (David Ogden Stiers) and Charles (Ed Begley Jr) and sister Rose (Amy Wright), and her romance with Macon’s editor Julian (Bill Pullman), is fickle, these elements provide most of the enjoyment in The Accidental Tourist. (The rest is supplied by the dog. I worried who was looking after him when Macon, Sarah and Muriel were all in Paris but, as Pauline Kael noted, ‘By this stage, Edward has gone the way of Hollywood dogs who have outlived their plot function’.) The unmarried trio of Learys isn’t dysfunctional exactly: they’re abnormal but the arrangement seems at first to suit all three, in the state of amiably arrested development which they seem to be in. The detail of their inveterate, unchanging routines – like their after-supper card game with its own elaborate nomenclature (it’s called ‘Vaccination’) – is amusing and convincing. The actors play these eccentrics without condescension and seeing Macon with them gives him some context – we get a sense of how much he’s grown up and away from his family, and how much he shares and remains rooted in their fusty detachment.
Thanks to Amy Wright and Bill Pullman, the courtship of Rose and Julian works well – there are times when it generates more interest than the affair between Macon and Muriel. Pullman’s natty unease is charming – and he’s able to get across both Julian’s surprise at what’s happening to him and its thrilling ineluctability. The Thanksgiving meal scene is jarring: her three brothers refuse a helping of turkey which they’re sure (from her track record) Rose has failed to cook safely and send her weeping from the room. The scene is redeemed by Julian’s decision to risk his life for love of Rose and by Bill Pullman’s blend of politeness to the others and quietly determined allegiance to Rose as he reaches for the carving knife and fork. Amy Wright has a fine moment when she’s knitting a sweater for Julian and Macon reminds her that he wears crew-necks. ‘He’ll wear a V-neck if somebody makes one for him’, Rose replies with quiet steeliness, ‘Don’t spoil this for me, Macon’. When Macon protests that ‘I’m only trying to protect you, sweetheart’ you don’t believe this is true: even if his feelings about the matter are less blatant than those of his bachelor brothers, Macon shares something of their selfish fear of Rose’s life changing. It’s a pity that this part of the story is treated in a more crudely comical way once Rose and Julian have wed. Porter and Charles aren’t eating properly so Rose has to move back in with them; desperate to keep their marriage going, Julian offers her a job sorting out the chaos of his office, which she takes on with alacrity; the last we hear is that he’s admitted defeat and moved into the Learys’ house, part of a ménage a quatre playing ‘Vaccination’ every night. This clumsy change of tone is unfortunately typical of the film and John Williams wrote a score to match. The music twinkles wanly most of the time; when it switches into uplifting mode, it too much resembles Williams’s score for the story of another accidental tourist, ET.
11 August 2009