BEFORE: Love in the Time of Corona, Day 4 - I'm determined to finish the March Marriage Madness Tournament, especially since the REAL March Madness Tournament has been cancelled. I imagine that millions of people are at home, not knowing how to pass the time without spending the day agonizing over filling out their brackets. Except for the Food Network's "Tournament of Champions", it seems like maybe I've got the only game in town that isn't on hold, so where's my endorsement check? I'll settle for people betting on my tournament, as long as I get a cut... (Seriously, somebody contact me...my principles are for sale at a reduced cost.)
Just two more days to go, then I'll have 2nd and 3rd round match-ups and announce the winner of my extremely un-scientific and very rigged process. In the meantime, Kevin Kline carries over from "Dean" and we'll find out after this which Kline-centric film is headed to the Elite 8.
THE PLOT: The story of a woman who loves her dog more than her husband - then her husband loses the dog.
AFTER: It's a simple enough story - girl meets dog, boy loses dog, and umm, the girl is married to the boy. Does the girl get the dog back again? That's the question, isn't it? Also, does the boy learn that he should have had the dog on a leash? I see people here in Queens all the time who can't seem to be bothered to use a leash when they walk their dogs, even though that's THE LAW, and apparently they all think their dog is SO SMART that it would never run out into the street, or get chased away by another dog, or just run off randomly. Each person who is so ignorant (or so lazy) could learn a very hard lesson, I'm just sorry that the poor dogs have to pay the price. And I wonder how we're going to contain the spread of the corona virus if some people can't even follow simple dog-walking guidelines.
Anyway, Beth rescues a dog that she sees by the side of the road, and ends up adopting him and naming him Freeway. Her husband, Joseph, is a successful spine surgeon, but someone who has over the years been putting perhaps too much focus on his job and not enough on his family. They have two adult daughters and a vacation home in Colorado that apparently has its own banquet hall, and requires a full-time caretaker. Yes, the dog is very lucky to have been adopted into this family. Many good things come from opening their hearts to this dog, including their daughter Grace finding love with the veterinarian. One simple act of kindness reaps many rewards.
However, one simple act of neglect also has a ripple effect, as Freeway runs off to chase a deer in the woods, and Joseph doesn't know what to do. This causes much friction in his marriage to Beth, and while it may be nobody's fault, it's totally Joseph's fault. Everything gets called into question, including whether Beth loves the dog more than her husband, and whether Joseph loves his job more than his family.
Extended members of their family - Joseph's sister, nephew, and sister's boyfriend stay behind after Grace's wedding to help look for the lost dog. That caretaker suddenly claims to have psychic Gypsy powers and suggests a holistic approach to searching for the dog, based on her visions. This is where, one might imagine, that the film would very easily run off the narrative rails, and in fact it came very close to doing so. But running around their Colorado town and the nearby hiking trails, paired up in particular ways by the psychic, coincidentally turns out to be exactly what the family needed to mend their broken relationships - it's not just Beth and Joseph's marriage that gets improved by working together for a common goal, it's the one between the nephew and his mother's new boyfriend, and that nephew, in a shaky romance with an offscreen girlfriend, starts to bond more with the psychic caretaker.
This all sounds very corny on paper, but on film it didn't seem so contrived - hey, if you don't know where exactly the dog is, chasing after psychic visions is as good a method as any, I guess. Thankfully the dog owners also go the more reliable routes, like they post flyers, they check the shelters, they issue an APB over the radio airwaves. Plus they previously had their dog microchipped, so while waiting for someone to see the dog and report in via phone, why not follow a psychic vision or two, especially since they seem to be somewhat valid, at least for a while.
There's a lot to like here, especially if you're a fan of the actors involved - I'm usually bullish on Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest and Richard Jenkins, myself, and there's nobody here I can't tolerate. Plus it's a pro-dog rescue film and one that advises proper care and dog parenting, so all of that is positive. There are a few negatives in the oddball characters, especially the weird guy who lives out in the woods and keeps a lot of dogs in makeshift cages - what was the point of this little diversion? Why was he wearing a Harvard shirt? Why was he such a prepper/Unabomber stereotype if it added nothing to the story? It's a diversion that goes nowhere, so why is it even there?
Ah, the IMDB trivia section points out that director Lawrence Kasdan and his wife adopted a dog from a rescue shelter, and he was lost during a trip to the Rockies. They searched for weeks, enlisting the help of friends and family, and just when they had given up hope, got a call from a stranger responding to their flyers, whose pack of dogs had been playing with their lost one. So like several recent films ("Marriage Story", "Dean"), the inspiration came from a specific time in the director's life, only that doesn't really explain the weird guy who lives in a shack in the woods. Maybe that also comes from the real-life incident, who can say?
I've been more of a cat person throughout my life, but most dogs tend to like me, too. Most of the cats in my life have been former strays, with only two exceptions. Sometimes stray cats take longer to come around and become affectionate, but eventually they get there. We've got two right now, Dax is living in the (furnished) basement while we work on integrating her to the upper floors, where Heidi is basically in charge of cat things. It's an agonizingly slow process, because Heidi only just took over 4 months ago when Data died. The trick is bringing the new cat together with the old one with a minimum of fighting, only there's bound to be some, it's instinctual and nearly inevitable, still I'd like to minimize the damage if possible. Plus we only JUST got Dax to relax around me and not view me as a threat when I feed her - recently I've been feeding her dinner on the main floor, but she's always nervous because she doesn't quite know where the other cat is, or if she's about to be attacked. It took over a year to integrate Heidi with Data, and now we're going through the process all over again, four months and counting.
I think I'm going to give the edge to this one over "Dean", so we'll see how "Darling Companion" fares in the second round of the tournament...
Also starring Diane Keaton (last seen in "Book Club"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Let Me In"), Dianne Wiest (last seen in "The Mule"), Elisabeth Moss (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Mark Duplass (last seen in "Tully"), Sam Shepard (last seen in "Fair Game"), Ayelet Zurer (last seen in "Ben-Hur"), Jay Ali, Lindsay Sloane (last seen in "Horrible Bosses 2"), Tod Huntington, Charles Halford (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Jericho Watson, Yolanda Wood, D.L. Walker, with cameos from Lawrence Kasdan (last seen in "Into the Night"), Jonathan Kasdan (last seen in "Dreamcatcher").
RATING: 6 out of 10 dead cell phone batteries
No comments:
Post a Comment