Mumford (1999) Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com/ Member: Online Film Critics Society
** out of four
"Kind of impatient for a big-time head shrinker, aren't you. How about you let me explain it my way, ok? Thanks, that'd be great."
Starring Loren Dean, Hope Davis, Jason Lee, Alfre Woodard, Martin Short, David Paymer, Ted Danson. Rated R.
The great thing about Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune is that aside from being entertainingly quirky, it was warmhearted, sunny and subtly emotional. What mires down the similarly eccentric Lawrence Kasdan comedy Mumford is that it isn't any of those things. It remains emotionally distant and oddly impersonal; its protagonist's true feelings a mystery to the audience. We laugh, we're entertained, but we can't get involved. We're simply denied access.
Mumford is about Dr. Mumford from the town of Mumford. Dr. Mumford (Loren Dean) is a psychologist who has only been in town a couple weeks and he already has more patients then the other two area head doctors combined. So talented is he that he is approached by the town's most affluent citizen, Skip Skipperton. You see, Skip is a computer whiz and owner of "Panda Modem", a company which employs most everyone who lives in Mumford. Skip is lonely and wants the doctor's help, but wants it discreetly. He is afraid that his company's stock may tumble if people find out he is visiting a psychologist. He wants Dr. Mumford to treat him without anyone finding out.
If you have not been exposed to this movie's advertising campaign and do not want to know its "secret" which is revealed in all the trailers, read no further.
Dr. Mumford gets to like Skip Skipperton, who reveals all of his secrets to him. So he tells Skip a secret of his own. He is not, "nor has [he] ever been" a psychologist. How he has managed to keep his lack of credentials a secret baffles Skip, who insists that while Doc Mumford may not be a psychologist, he's good at it. His other patients may or may not agree. Seeing as he treats nearly everyone in the town, the rest of his clientele, whom we get to know fairly intimately is an eccentric group indeed. The head cases include: Nessa, a angst-ridden teenager pissed off about everything that it is possible to get pissed off about and then some; Henry, a troubled pharmacist obsessed with his film-noir style sexual fantasies which he doesn't deem himself worthy of starring in; and finally Sophie, a woman allegedly afflicted with Chronic Fatigue Disorder, and a woman Dr. Mumford winds up falling in love with.
None of these people have any idea that their trusted psychologist is a fake (why he is pretending to be a P.h.D. I will not reveal), and they go on confiding in him. He is good at what he does: he's a terrific listener and a perceptive person. But nevertheless he is not a doctor, and it isn't long before he is hounded by the certification board.
We are allowed to get to know Dr. Mumford's patients almost uncomfortably well. They are surprisingly interesting people: complex and often touchingly troubled. That's all well and good, but what about our main character? Don't we need to get to know him? Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill) keeps Dr. Mumford strangely isolated from the audience. We never have the privilege of being involved in his feelings, his thoughts, his motives. When the love story subplot rolls around, we have a hard time accepting it because we don't know what's driving Mumford. We scarcely get any clues about the man's nature. The situation is hardly helped by Loren Dean's performance; he underplays his role to the point where he looks like he is reciting his lines off a teleprompter.
There's something else plaguing Mumford; a flaw that bugged me only in retrospect: it is a naggingly unprogressive movie. Common sense dictates that a storyline should, in some way, progress from point A to point B. Wierder films may have it backwards or may be jumping all over the place, but its protagonists change, as do the people around them. Mumford starts at point A and never really goes anywhere. As I walked out of the theater, I thought about what I saw and realized that the only elements that changed were the Doc's patients. But was the film about them? Our primary focus, Dr. Mumford remains stoic and closed off; worse, we are led to believe that the events of the movie have had no effect on the man.
I was never bored watching Mumford; it was just quirky enough and just amusing enough to hold my attention for 96 minutes. But I was never engaged in the film's story nor did I care about its main character. I've seen far worse dramedies than this one, but for the accomplished Kasdan, it isn't particularly impressive. Oh, and by the way, if you met a man who spends all his free time making robot sextoys, what would you do? ©1999 Eugene Novikov ‰
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