MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Accidental Tourist’ Packs the Real Stuff

“The Accidental Tourist” (Mann’s Plaza, Westwood) seems just about the best holiday gift imaginable. Its subject is the true stuff of life, especially that stuff that seems to loom so large at Christmas and as we face a new year: love, families, our capacity, our willingness to change.

This transposition by director, co-writer Lawrence Kasdan of Anne Tyler’s warm and singular novel bristles with eccentric, memorable characters, part of whose fun for us comes in measuring just how close they are to the faces in our bathroom mirror each morning. It contains a performance by William Hurt so finely observed and so tenderly acted that it borders on the preternatural.

And each of the other actors in its large cast is so distinctively good that when you re-read the book, the characters keep the stamp of these actors, right down to the Welsh corgi who plays Edward. Finally, “The Accidental Tourist” is irresistibly funny.

That’s a difficult quality to reconcile yourself to in a film whose partial subject is death and mourning; yet a wry and special humor permeates everything here. The laughs may not come in whoops--except for Edward and the cellar stairs--they unfold in recognition and in unbelieving astonishment. A lot of “The Accidental Tourist” is pretty astonishing.

Its central figure is Macon Leary (Hurt), a writer whose specialty is compiling the travel books of the title, for Americans with a horror of travel. For them he will report on what Tokyo restaurants serve Sweet ‘n Low or whether any restaurant in Rome offers the reassurance of Chef Boyardee ravioli. He’s not old, not young, and as we meet him, not happy but holding.

His wife, Sarah (Kathleen Turner), calls that quality “muffled.” It is, heaven knows, a Leary family trait but it has been intensified by the shocking death a year ago of Macon and Sarah’s son, Ethan, shot in what television reporters delight in calling a senseless murder. (As though the killing of a 12-year-old could make sense in any context.)

During that succeeding year, Macon, never in the thick of life anyway, has retreated even further, and Sarah has needed comfort and not found it. So as we meet her, she is moving out, to another part of Baltimore, traumatizing Macon even more--if such a thing were possible.

It’s a move with far-reaching effects. It forces Macon to board Edward at a kennel while he travels; introduces Macon to the kennel’s magnificent ditz, Muriel Pritchett (Geena Davis); inadvertently brings Macon back to the bosom of his extremely strange family (blame Edward for that, too, in the film’s most explosively hilarious moment), and changes the course of everyone’s life forever.

Geena Davis’ sympathetic Muriel, a towering vision from her shorts and ankle straps to her press-on nails, is so outside Macon’s ken that he can barely focus on her. But something about the miasma of grief that envelopes him, touches her, even before she knows the details.

Muriel is struggling, cheerful, resolute. Divorced, with a waifish, allergic 7-year-old son, Alexander (Robert Gorman), she sets herself to comfort this man, not--as his brothers all later decide--to “catch” him, but as much as to resuscitate his soul. It’s a gesture gorgeous to behold and a recurring strain in the film.

Macon’s sister Rose (Amy Wright) is a nurturer, too, as well as a compulsive organizer. But she has worn herself into such a groove, taking care of Macon’s two towering brothers, Charles (Ed Begley Jr.) and Porter (David Ogden Stiers) that her talents haven’t had much exercise outside their enveloping Victorian family home.

However, put a needy bachelor like Macon’s decent, funny publisher Julian (Bill Pullman) in front of Rose, telling her about incomprehensible things in his life like instant coffee and “singles apartments” and she heads straight for the kitchen, to make a pot of real coffee. On things far less substantial than this have romances begun. (How sweet and how subtle Wright and Pullman are here; and how deliciously waggish are Stiers and Begley Jr.)

Kasdan, who with Frank Galati is one of the film’s two credited screenwriters, has a lovely way of showing us Macon’s and Muriel’s growing attraction. Sticky movie shorthand would be the swoony, walk-by-the-riverbank, pirouette-with-dozens-of-balloons montage, the Adrian Lyne touch. Kasdan gives us Macon teaching Alexander how to change a washer; Muriel working her way through a stack of ironing; Macon vacuuming up dog hair so that Alexander has fewer asthma attacks.

In “The Accidental Tourist,” the adult men can’t connect; the women around them can do nothing but. Precipitously, some time after Macon and Muriel have begun to live together, even Sarah decides to re-connect, creating panic out in our seats.

More than you wanted James Mason to overcome his wounds and walk to safety in “Odd Man Out,” more than you wanted Gary Cooper to follow Ingrid Bergman in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” you want Macon to see what there is to the fierce, unsuitable round-eyed Muriel and make a stand for her. But new bonds are pathetically frail, habit is a powerful force and Kathleen Turner does play Macon’s wife. And so the movie makes us tremble.

The ensemble, on both sides of the camera, that created “The Accidental Tourist” (rated PG for its one discreet love scene) is formidable. Their artistry is all-inclusive, but may we have a special word for the production design-art team (imagine knowing that the Learys are exactly the family to buy that Franklin Mint collection of miniature vases . . . and to display them); to the cinematographer who warmed each cranny of these Stygian Victorians and certainly for the costume designer, who must have had the time of her life creating Muriel. The names are below.

This is not a picture of startling outward action; it is the struggle of life against inertia and its progress is measured by calipers. But the smile that closes the film is as warming as the most blazing sunrise David Lean ever commanded to appear. You just have to look a little carefully.

‘THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST’

A Warner Bros. Pictures release. Producers Lawrence Kasdan, Charles Okun, Michael Grillo. Executive producers Phyllis Carlyle, John Malkovich. Director Kasdan. Screenplay Frank Galati, Kasdan, based on the book by Anne Tyler. Camera John Bailey. Editor Carol Littleton. Music John Williams. Production design Bo Welch. Art direction Tom Duffield, set decoration Cricket Rowland, set design Paul Sonski, Nick Navarro, Ann Harris. Costumes Ruth Myers. Sound David MacMillan. With William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Geena Davis, Amy Wright, Bill Pullman, Robert Gorman, David Ogden Stiers, Ed Begley Jr. Running time: 2 hours, 1 minute.