The Accidental Tourist
Director: Lawrence Kasdan. Cast: William Hurt, Geena Davis, Kathleen Turner, Amy Wright, Bill Pullman, David Ogden Stiers,
Ed Begley, Jr. Screenplay: Lawrence Kasdan and Frank Galati (based on the novel by Anne Tyler).
Anyone who finds Lawrence Kasdan's The Accidental Tourist a little somnolent has got a point. William Hurt, as so
often, acts with his forehead, and he's even more internalized here than in most of his roles. No one in the cast really
rises above a whisper, even in the throes of grief or the springtime of a new crush, and the pacing of the film isn't
trying to get anywhere fast.
Still, the unrushed serenity and tonal restraint of The Accidental Tourist is also its saving grace and by far its
most interesting quality: it's one of those movies you enjoyed long ago and discover, against expectations, that it hasn't
really lost much years later. The source text is Anne Tyler's novel about Macon Leary (Hurt), a writer whose stock in trade
is a series of travelogues for reluctant business travelers who want a Big Mac, a minimum of hassle, and a warm envelope of
domestic routine no matter where they're forced to peregrinate. The analogy to Macon's own psychology—he's laconic and
almost scarily closed-off, keeping a tight lid on emotion even after his son is killed in a robbery—is almost painfully
literalist, and it's more embarrassing off the page than on. Kasdan, along with co-writer Frank Galati (the scribe behind the
Grapes of Wrath stage adaptation), make a mistake of preserving some of Tyler's most redundant passages, and the script saddles poor
Kathleen Turner, who's already a little stiff in the role of Macon's wife Sarah, with too much armchair philosophizing. It's
klutzy and a little lazy to start your movie with a scene of one character telling another (plus the audience) what he's
really, really like. It's worse that a sequence five minutes into the movie only confirms things we've inferred in less than
three.
By the same token, though, the over-attention given to Macon's evident inhibitions offers a good cover to the equally plain
but somehow less obvious dimension of his chosen career: for a guy who loves the familiar, he sure seeks it out in some
unlikely places. Only an introvert would write or read Macon's books, but so too, only a closeted people-person, someone
peeping over the wall of his own taciturnity, curious to know what lies outside, would make a career of traveling to all
these places that he purports not to enjoy. Or maybe he's just trying to avoid his wife. Either way, though The Accidental
Tourist prompts us to expect a story of how some live-wire outsider will spark Macon's life, it turns out to be more of
a story of Macon looking for love, seeking a connection, even when it seems like he's avoiding one.
Under these conditions, it's quietly believable that Macon would be drawn to Muriel Pritchett, the dog-trainer played by
Geena Davis in her Oscar-winning role. Muriel is like a pure distillation of what screenwriters mean by the word "quirky":
she wears frilly little angle-length socks with her scarlet pumps, wears too much makeup and too many tiger-stripes, and
she believes she can communicate with dogs through a clucking language of her own devising.
Muriel would be a sideshow attraction in a lot of movies. In almost any other environment, she'd be too oddball even as the
"free spirit" who liberates Ben Stiller or Luke Wilson or whoever from his narrow paradigms of demure femininity. More
likely, she'd be the blind date from Mars who telegraphs Ben's or Luke's need to find a normal person who's still fun. A
screwball director like Howard Hawks might have used Muriel as the dynamite for a firecracking romantic farce; she's sort
of a déclassée version of Katharine Hepburn's pet-loving dingbat in Bringing Up Baby, and given Hawks' trademark
interest in the collisions of career and desire, The Accidental Tourist could have been a huge, rollicking hit. Tyler
has even provided the kind of eccentric second-tier characters that were prerequisites of a Hawks or a Cukor comedy—Macon's
three siblings still live together, well into middle-age, and they alphabetize the contents of their pantry—though, in Kasdan's
hands, even the scenes in this absent-minded household are pretty muffled.
One might harbor anachronistic dreams while watching The Accidental Tourist, wishing it were the movie that filmmakers
of another era might have made of it. But it needs to be said that Kasdan's restraint seems exactly right for this material.
I'm not even sure how a real screwball comedy would have gone over in 1988. The absurdist timbre of A Fish Called Wanda
would have been wrong for this story, whose characters are defined by their different kinds of humility. Even the rowdier,
bouncier comedies from the same vintage, like Bull Durham or Big, are respectively slowed down by the hedonistic sensuality
and the nostalgia that seem characteristic of '80s studio filmmaking even when it worked, which it usually didn't. In any
case, it's not fair to assume that the filmgoing ethos that defined the screwball era, where death was often a joke (His
Girl Friday, Arsenic and Old Lace), could be reprised unchanged in a far-flung decade. To wish it otherwise
would be a symptom of the very nostalgia we sense in so many 80s films and filmmaking genres—the flowering of Merchant-Ivory
period pieces, the child/adult swap comedies, the European imitations of Woody Allen, the differently retro visions of Demme
and Lynch.
To my mind, The Accidental Tourist finds the right cadence and register not just for its plot but for the moment in
which it is made. Partial evidence for my hunch that another approach wouldn't have worked is that Kasdan's one attempt at
a comic set-piece, involving a dog, a skateboard, and a laundry basket, is almost stultifyingly lame, because it's totally
out of character for Macon and for the movie. After all, the precipitating event of this film is the death of a child—it's the reason Sarah leaves Macon,
which is the reason he meets Muriel—and the whole movie makes clear that Macon's grief isn't really worked through even as
his romantic life is rejuvenated. A measure of comic sobriety is hardly out of place here. Cinematographer John Bailey, who has brought a vivid sense of color to movies as
different as In the Line of Fire and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, works almost totally
in mute greys and cornflower blues for this picture. Even when Geena Davis pops up in her wacky ensembles, Bailey's lighting concepts wisely
tone them down, rather than keying up the rest of the movie to complement her. All of the actors look just fine, and yet
the shots don't work overtime doing favors for them: Turner is typically lovely but a little haggard, and no one's trying to make William
Hurt look any less pale than he is. (When Macon walks to the bathroom sink in the mornings, Hurt looks like he's trying
to push his gut out a little.) Even John Williams, who for once writes the music that the film needs rather than the music
he'd like to hear, works delicately in minor keys, and the repeated motifs gently emphasize that while certain things change
for these characters over the course of the plot, others do not. The filmmaking crew even survives the double-jeopardy test
of hewing to their tonal convictions even when the story takes them to Paris; the colors all remain the same, and I don't
even remember spotting the Eiffel Tower or a baguette sticking out of a grocery sack anywhere.
All of this leads to a remarkably unpretentious and, to use an unfashionable term, a realistic connection to the story and
its people. Paris is just another place the movie ventures, much like Baltimore, which is just what Macon would want; it is
also the scene for his true change of heart, which is also what he wants, and what we want; everyone's happy, without betraying
the central concepts. When Muriel eventually wins us over, as Davis' bright performance certainly allows her to do, the credit can go
to the character and the actress, not to the cheap tricks of flattering photography or jerry-rigged designs. Hurt's own
modulated performance is equally responsible for the happiness of the ending. We are glad for Macon because we can see a new
gladness in Hurt's face, a subtle but unmistakable alteration from his other close-ups in the picture, and a sure sign that Hurt
has managed the nifty feat of keeping us at bay through the film without ever shutting us out. It is lovely to enjoy a romantic
conclusion to a tale like this without being prodded into outright euphoria. Love stories at the movies often run on the notion that
when you find the right person, the rest of life just falls away, and when the movie is The Lady Eve or Moulin
Rouge!, the pleasure is more than infectious. But The Accidental Tourist very neatly manages to show us a
relationship that springs to life between two people whose thoughts still, to some degree, lie elsewhere. Macon still has a son to mourn and
Muriel has one to raise, and the film is quite clear that the one does not replace the other, at least not in a glib way.
Macon and Muriel may or may not make it, and if they don't, they will both remember this moment of the connection fondly.
It's a priceless interlude within lives that have paid highish prices, but the movie doesn't belabor the characters' sadness
any more than their happiness. There simply isn't a grand gesture in the film, so it's easy to feel that The Accidental Tourist is doing something wrong, if you're
expecting It Happened One Night; and sure, it seems like an odd thing for the New York Film Critics to have voted their
annual Best Picture citation to this movie in a year of Bull Durham, Dead Ringers, and Distant Voices, Still
Lives. But let's leave aside the heavy-hitter awards and the enormous expectations. This is a warm movie told in the
temperature of almost-recognizable life; it's a believable love story, joked up a bit but not too much, and it puts the high
gloss and burnished complacency of so many adaptations of beloved novels to shame. In fact, it's the kind of movie Lasse
Hallström might have made before he became Lasse "Miramax" Hallström, and that's a good thing. In one memorable scene, Macon's sister Rose grossly undercooks
a Thanksgiving turkey, and her suitor, Julian, eats it. He doesn't get ill, he doesn't vomit. There's no punch line at all, because
the joke is already there: it's the kind of weird, awkward situation we sometimes put each other in, or that we put ourselves
in. That's all the wit and humor that the moment wants or needs, and so the scene is freed to produce something honest, a new
intimacy. "He ate my turkey," Rose murmurs. She understands, quietly but giddily, what Julian was saying by eating it—that
he loves her. The Accidental Tourist is quiet, and a little zany, but most of all, it understands. Grade: B
- Academy Award Nominations and *Winners:
- Best Picture
- *Best Supporting Actress: Geena Davis
- Best Adapted Screenplay: Frank Galati and Lawrence Kasdan
- Best Original Score: John Williams
- Golden Globe Nominations:
- Best Picture
- Best Original Score: John Williams
- Other Awards:
- New York Film Critics Circle—Best Picture