The Accidental Torist. - movie reviews

National Review, March 10, 1989 by John Simon

OVER THE vociferous bafflement of some of the fancier members of the New York Film Critics' Circle, The Accidental Tourist, then still unreleased, limped off with the Best Film award and, unusually, no award in any other category. Nevertheless, Lawrence Kasdan's movie, from his and Frank Galati's screenplay based on Anne Tyler's book, is not without its minor, almost marginal, virtues, not to mention the serious merit of being aimed at adults, not overgrown or undergrown juveniles. In its tight, perhaps excessive, restraint, it is the polar opposite of Mississippi Burning, and would deserve praise for that alone.

Miss Tyler's novel, which the adaptation follows closely, is high-minded schlock, but at least does not yield a film catering to any of the prevailing forms of tasteless craving, whether for the dialectics of yuppiedom or the metaphysics of the car chase. The main plot concerns Macon Leary, whose solid upper-crust Baltimore marriage to Sarah crumbles after the murder of their young son during an out-of-control holdup. Macon is a writer of travel books for accidental tourists, Americans who on business trips abroad-like himself on the journey through life-want to feel that they never left home. Accidental, too, is Macon's broken leg, caused by a panicky leap of his frightened corgi, Edward.

While his leg is in a cast, Macon moves into the Learys' ancestral home, shared by his spinster sister Rose, who alphabetizes the groceries in the pantry, and by two bachelor brothers even stodgier than Macon. But Edward must be taught some manners and is taken for lessons in canine comportment to Muriel, an extremely unconventional divorcee who lets her feelings hang out like laundry in Naples, and who, while teaching Edward how to behave himself, undertakes to teach his owner how not to. There is also a subplot in which Julian, Macon's spirited publisher, falls for and marries Rose, with seriocomic results.

Much about The Accidental Tourist is either too cramped and ossified-as is the nature of the tale-or, if dealing with Muriel, somewhat preciously eccentric. It is a film dealing in extremes, with very little in between, yet often seeming so low-keyed as if it were all in between. All the same, it deals with adult problems far more compellingly than its only recent American competitor, Woody Allen's stupefyingly contrived Another Woman. Above all, Kasdan's work manages not to look and feel like that of a Bergman epigone, no small achievement in American moviemaking, where an authentically grown-up voice seems hard to come by.

It is unfortunate that the best performances come in supporting roles, from Bill Pullman as a genuinely threedimensional Julian, and Amy Wright, whose quirkiness is unforced throughout. And, as Edward, there is Bud, the relatively rare canine actor who suggests that he might have studied with Stanislavsky. (Three other Cardigan corgis acted as stand-ins, but the triumph is Bud's.) William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, and especially Geena Davis (it's not easy to incarnate the life force) are all a shade overexplicit; but John Bailey's cinematography is a wonder of many-shaded restraint: a subdued palette that nevertheless encompasses a host of gradations. His camera is like fine furniture polish to the old mahagony of these surroundings and lives: it does more than just show, it reveals.

OUR APPOINTMENT was for 12:30 at Nicola Paone's, then as now the favorite restaurant of NATIONAL REVIEW'S editors. It was 1965, and NR had decided to publish a food-andwine column ("Delectations") that would alternate with Alec Waugh's travel column. James Beard had recommended that we ask Nika Standen Hazelton, a star in the New York food world, to write the column. She and I were to discuss it over lunch.

The initial amenities concluded, Nika took over the meeting. She told me in no uncertain terms what she would and would not do for us. It was mostly would-nots: She would not laud an inferior restaurant, or praise a bad wine. She would not pull her punches. She would refuse any assignment she deemed unsuitable. In addition, the payment we had suggested was unacceptable. Then she smiled. Nika is imposing, a handsome, statuesque Nordic blonde, who comes over more Brunnhilde than Tinker Bell, but when she smiles one tends to melt.

I was captivated. I liked her toughness and her style, and the underlying humor of her conducting the interview when it was we who were the buyers and she the seller. I agreed to her terms-unconditional surrender. Dealing with Nika, I could tell, would never be boring, and I suspected that her column would be as fresh and as ebullient as its author. I was right on both counts. Bosses have never scared Nika, as she recounts in Ups and Downs: Memoirs of Another Time (Harper & Row, $19.95). In Geneva in the early Thirties, as an apprentice reporter covering the reparation talks, the young Nika was befriended by Aristide Briand, head of the French reparations delegation, who bought her a lunch or two. When her editor-elated at this contact-asked her how Briand thought the talks were going, Nika drew herself up haughtily and declared: "I never mix my personal life with business." That she was not fired out of hand is remarkable.