A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

The Daytrippers (Greg Mottola, 1996)

Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, and Parker Posey in The Daytrippers
Cast: Hope Davis, Anne Meara, Parker Posey, Liev Schreiber, Pat McNamara, Stanley Tucci, Campbell Scott, Stephanie Venditto, Marc Grapey, Douglas McGrath, Marcia Gay Harden. Screenplay: Greg Mottola. Cinematography: John Inwood. Production design: Bonnie J. Brinkley. Film editing: Anne McCabe. Music: Richard Martinez.

The Daytrippers is a mashup of subgenres: It's a road movie, a marital dramedy, a midlife crisis fable, and even an extended mother-in-law joke. No wonder it took so long to find a distributor: How do you market a movie like this? But it's also a wonderful sleeper find, if you just happen to come across it on the Criterion Channel, as I did. First of all, it's a terrific ensemble of skilled actors, some of them cast against type, like Marcia Gay Harden as a ditz in an extended cameo. The premise is this: Louis and Eliza D'Amico (Stanley Tucci and Hope Davis) are apparently happily married, but when he leaves their Long Island home one day for his editorial job in the city, she finds a note that suggests he may be having an affair with someone named Sandy. When she tells her mother (Anne Meara) about this, Mom insists that her husband (Pat McNamara) drive everyone into Manhattan to confront Louis and uncover the identity of Sandy. "Everyone" includes Eliza's sister, Jo (Parker Posey), and her boyfriend, Carl (Liev Schreiber), who happen to be visiting for the Thanksgiving holiday. This is not exactly your close-knit family, as it's held together loosely by the domineering mother, kept just this side of caricature by Meara's shrewdly calculated performance. The rest is a series of misadventures, as the family follows a series of clues and false leads, winding up in often hilarious but also poignant little side trips. It's the lack of go-ahead story that I think tripped up some of the movie's initial critics, like Roger Ebert, who found the movie, especially Meara's character, annoying. But there's so much about The Daytrippers that's closely observed and skillfully performed that I found myself wanting to see it again just to watch the way some brilliant performances -- Schreiber is especially wonderful in a role that's a 180 from tough guy Ray Donovan -- mesh into a true ensemble.

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