![]() ![]() The set-up perhaps doesn’t pass the smell test of comic potential, but as scripted by Kasdan and Frank Galati, the movie is a comedy about people rather than their situations. To put the nail in the coffin, Sarah announces one morning that she is leaving Macon and has rented an apartment in the city. Ethan was the lone victim of an armed robbery, and Macon is still haunted by the fatherhood of which he was cheated by total chance. ![]() Adapted from Anne Tyler’s novel of the same name, the film follows Macon Leary (William Hurt), an author of travel guidebooks whose marriage to Sarah (Kathleen Turner) is slowly disintegrating a year after the murder of their son Ethan. Kasdan, the great filmmaker behind 1983’s The Big Chill and 1991’s Grand Canyon, is the reason for this expertly executed tightrope walk. Scenes of purely human comedy and tragedy with a tempo as relaxed and unpredictable as life itself play against the backdrop of a story about grief and, in some ways, coming back to the land of the living. ![]() Kasdan’s film is so impossibly well-managed tonally that one finishes it in a kind of daze. The late, great Roger Ebert once called Lawrence Kasdan’s 1988 drama The Accidental Tourist, the most delightful film of the year, but “also seemingly one of the most depressing.” That’s an accurate description of this gentle and sympathetic comedy about a man mourning the loss of his son. ![]()
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