Hurt plays Macon Leary, a travel book author whose carefully calibrated existence has been shattered by the murder of his young son. Macon and his wife, Sarah (Kathleen Turner), are so depressed by their loss, they decide to separate at the beginning of the film. The extremely blunt scene in which they make this decision works in theory, but it's so morosely spelled out the actors calcify before your eyes. Hurt's jaw seems locked into place with a clamp, as if grief has inexplicably come to rest in his mandible. He carries on that way for the better part of the picture, and his single-mindedness is often maddening.
But this is a movie about hope returning to a man who's lost it, so along comes Muriel Pritchett (Geena Davis), a free-spirited kennel operator. Davis won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar® for her work here, and she's a brilliant burst of spontaneity in a film that's in dire need of one. She deserved her award, and she makes the movie worth watching, but Muriel is too overtly 'kooky' for complete comfort. The same goes for Macon's outrageously anal-retentive siblings (Amy Wright, David Ogden Stiers, and Ed Begley, Jr.), all of whom are in dire need of professional care.
The key problem is that director Lawrence Kasdan (who co-adapted Anne Tyler's novel) spells everything out in the broadest possible signifiers: you're either marching through the day like a neurotic stick-in-the-mud, or you're a life-affirming representative of Extra-Wacky. In case you don't get it, the script is peppered with speeches that clear it up for you. The only truly challenging aspect of this movie is its lethargic pace. The rest is commercial cinema Esperanto.
The video transfer is first-rate, with little, if any, drop in clarity during darker interludes, and the sound mix is clear. There's truly no complaints on the technical end. You also get the original trailer, and there's a watchable featurette called It's Like Life. But the real bonuses are a scene-specific audio track courtesy of the always-delightful Davis, and a selection of deleted scenes, some of which were re-written and incorporated into the finished picture in different form. Many of them were deleted with good reason, however. The one titled 'Rose slow-cooks the turkey' just about says it all.
For more information about The Accidental Tourist, visit Warner Video. To order The Accidental Tourist, go to TCM Shopping.
by Paul Tatara
