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.

Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)

Considering that we spend half our waking lives at work, it's surprising that there are so few good films about what we do there. The problem may be that many, if not most, of the jobs we do lack the essential narrative shape: beginning, middle, and end. They're a routine repeating itself until death or retirement provides the closure. The exceptions would seem to be cops and doctors, who deal with life and death, and sometimes lawyers, if their jobs lead to the courtroom and aren't just an eternal drawing up of documents. But surprisingly, given the low esteem in which they're held by the general public, there are also some classic films about journalists at work; His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) and All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) come immediately to mind. (I omit Orson Welles's magnum opus because it seems to me less about journalism than about obsession.) I will have to add Spotlight to the list, though despite its best picture Oscar (or maybe because of it) I think it's too soon to call it a great film. What makes it work for me is that it's a convincing portrait of what I know about journalists: that the good ones love what they do. Take Mike Rezendes, for example, whom I got to know a bit at the Mercury News. He's a few inches shorter and quite a few pounds lighter than Mark Ruffalo, who plays him in the movie, but what Ruffalo gets right about Rezendes is his absolute delight in doing the job right, flinging himself body and soul into his work. I would also single out here the performance of Liev Schreiber, one of our best and most underappreciated actors, whose Marty Baron is a spot-on portrait of the journalist who has found himself promoted upstairs to where his commitment to the profession is regarded with suspicion, even though his heart is in the right place. Michael Keaton's Walter Robinson is one of those who suspect Baron, and I wish there had been more scenes in which the growing confidence each has in the other was dramatized. John Slattery's Ben Bradlee Jr. is a keen portrayal of the journalist whose edges have been worn down to the point where he's always in danger of playing it too safe. Now, this judgment of the film is being made by someone who knows the territory, but considering how many cop movies seem ludicrous to cops, and how doctors tend to despise medical dramas, I think it speaks well of writer-director Tom McCarthy and his co-screenwriter Josh Singer that they manage to capture the essence of the journalism game (at least as it was in 2001-03, before the demise of newspapers) so extraordinarily well.