MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Leaving Normal’ Goes Awry in Hunt for Right Road

It was a celebrated English actor, or so the story goes, who was moved to proclaim as his time grew near, “dying is easy, comedy is hard.” What “Leaving Normal” indicates is that the poor man only got it half right: Comedy is hard, but mixing comedy and drama is harder still.

“Leaving Normal,” directed by Edward Zwick and starring Christine Lahti and Meg Tilly, is a fairly ambitious attempt to encompass a wide range of emotions and situations, from gentle comedy to serious pain. It is a character-driven film that is about people more than plot. It is also, unfortunately, more promising in its intentions than satisfying in its execution, a film in the unusual position of having bitten off somewhat more than it can chew.

Normal in this film is more than a state of mind, it is a specific place in Wyoming where Marianne Johnson (Tilly) is headed to join a new husband she barely knows, and Darly Peters (Lahti) already works as the toughest talking cocktail waitress on either side of the Continental Divide.

Neither woman, however, is fated to last long in Normal. Just as soon as Marianne gets reacquainted with her husband, she realizes she’s made a terrible mistake and bolts out the door. Almost as immediately, she comes across Darly, who is leaving town and headed for Alaska, where she has come into a piece of land. And before you can even think “Thelma & Louise,” the two have hit the road together, on the lookout for the future.

All this happens quite quickly, and gives the start of “Leaving Normal” (at the El Cajon Cinema 8, rated R for language) a brisk, promising feel. The same is true of the film’s odd-couple protagonists, two women whose collective lack of luck is the only thing that joins them.

As played by Tilly, the spacey mistress of the high lonesome look, Marianne is an optimistic dreamer, compulsively bright and chipper in the face of disaster after disaster. Never mind that both her marriages have been failures, that she has never managed to commit to anything and can’t seem to get serious about life. She is sure as sure can be that any day now things are going to change.

Darly, though equally rootless, could hardly be classified as an optimist. A loud, bustier-wearing, take-no-prisoners type whose last accomplishment was sleeping with her only friend’s husband, she sees herself as hard-nosed as they come. “Do I seem, what’s that word . . . “ she says to Marianne, who responds with “a total bitch,” when what Darly had in mind was “more like insensitive.”

The road partnership between these two is a classic combination of sensitivity and assertiveness, of the wounded deer tagging along with the momma bear. And, initially at least, it is quite pleasant to see this pair of actresses given their head and encouraged to reveal more and more of their character’s inner traumas as their whale of a car heads up north.

The problem with “Leaving Normal” is not that it has nowhere specific to go but that it is off in too many directions at once. As a film about aimless people whose search for a destination is really a search for themselves, it runs the risk of appearing aimless itself, and it is a risk the filmmakers have been unable to surmount.

It’s not that screenwriter Edward Solomon (one of the pair responsible for the “Bill and Ted” epics) hasn’t provided any charming situations for his travelers to luxuriate in. It’s rather that those situations feel more like odd and undigested pieces of plot than part of a coherent whole. Without a clear through-line, which neither Solomon nor director Zwick (“Glory,” “About Last Night . . . “) have provided, “Leaving Normal” feels nebulous and unfocused, and its collection of nominally lovable eccentrics starts to come off as more glib and saccharin than heartfelt.

And while “Leaving Normal” tries to mix dark moments with this comedy, it never develops enough heft to make those episodes seem other than arbitrary. In the same way, Lahti, though she is clearly delighted at the opportunity to play a character with a heart of coal, never convinces us that she was ever as flinty and unfeeling as the script would have you believe. Much of her performance, like much of the film itself, is likable enough, but “Leaving Normal” wants to earn our concern and our emotional involvement, and that is a much tougher assignment.

‘Leaving Normal’

Christine Lahti: Darly

Meg Tilly: Marianne

Patrika Darbo: 66

Lenny Von Dohlen; Harry

James Gammon; Walt

A Mirage production, released by Universal Pictures. Director Edward Zwick. Producer Lindsay Duran. Executive producer Sydney Pollack. Screenplay Edward Solomon. Cinematographer Ralf Bode. Editor Victor Du Bois. Costumes Patricia Norris. Music W. G. Snuffy Walden. Production design Patricia Norris. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language).