THE DAYTRIPPERS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Cinepix) Starring: Hope Davis, Anne Meara, Parker Posey, Liev Schreiber, Pat McNamara, Stanley Tucci, Campbell Scott. Screenplay: Greg Mottola. Producers: Nancy Tenenbaum and Steven Soderbergh. Director: Greg Mottola. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 88 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
There is a quality to certain independent films which I have referred to in the past as an "oppressive quirkiness." As frustrating as it can be to watch a Hollywood release which is a non-stop monotone of plot or action, it is similarly frustrating when a film-maker's infatuation with colorful characters at the expense of narrative results in all those colors blurring into a dull brown. Actors understandably love playing those characters, but independent writer-directors -- frequently rookie auteurs -- can't always tame their creations into a solid story. Greg Mottola's THE DAYTRIPPERS is characterized by a quirkiness more pervasive than oppressive, and some of it is quite entertaining. By the time it's all over, however, you may find yourself wondering what the point of it all was.
Hope Davis stars as Eliza D'Amico, a Long Island schoolteacher with a happy marriage to husband Louis (Stanley Tucci), a publishing house editor. At least she thinks it's a happy marriage, until she finds a love letter which appears to be to Louis from someone named Sandy. Unsure what to do, Eliza brings her concerns to her family, gathered in town for Thanksgiving: mother Rita (Anne Meara), father Jim (Pat McNamara), younger sister Jo (Parker Posey) and Jo's boyfriend Carl (Liev Schreiber). They suggest that Eliza needs to investigate her suspicions, and accompany her into New York City for a Friday-after-Thanksgiving day of sleuthing. As it turns out, they may find out more about each other than about Louis's fidelity.
For well over half of THE DAYTRIPPERS, the character riffs provide a lot of laughs without becoming repetitive or abrasive. Liev Schreiber has the most subtly amusing role, an intellectual would-be author who bashes middle class obliviousness even as he sucks up to the obliviously middle class Rita. His rather pompous diatribes are played straight and in a low key, making his later humbling at the hands of a rival author (Campbell Scott) as sad as it is funny. Anne Meara and Pat McNamara play the bickering parents with interesting shadings on stereotypical characterizations, and Parker Posey again shows off her indie-queen charm. Mottola puts them in a variety of bizarre situations, including what Posey aptly describes as "the shortest car chase in history," and peppers the film with memorable minor roles like Marcia Gay Harden's turn as a drunken party-goer trying to deal with the presence of an ex-boyfriend at the party. At the sane center sits Hope Davis's Eliza, a woman trying to maintain her dignity under stressful conditions -- if worrying about your husband having a mistress were not bad enough, _you_ try to deal with it while trapped in a car with your parents.
As the story plays out, Eliza's positioning in that sane center proves to be one of THE DAYTRIPPERS' most glaring problems. Ultimately, this story is about how Eliza comes to be in the situation of chasing around her possibly-philandering husband, but mostly we watch Eliza reacting to the people around her. It may be part of Mottola's vision for Eliza that she is too passive, yet the result is that we don't understand enough about who Eliza is or how she feels about her life. We see that Rita has manipulated her daughters' relationships in a thinly disguised disdain for their value as individuals, and that should guide us to an awakening in Eliza. Instead, we get an abrupt emotional response and an even more abrupt conclusion to the film, hard on the heels of a revelation which feels more self-consciously clever than appropriate for the rest of the film.
On an even more fundamental level, THE DAYTRIPPERS loses its audience because it loses its sense of humor. After sixty minutes worth of appealing wit, Mottola perhaps falls victim to a concern that his film will be considered too frivolous. Thus follows a series of shouting matches, confrontations and Big Dramatic Moments which ends up melding two acts of George Bernard Shaw to one act of Tennessee Williams. THE DAYTRIPPERS has a lot of good-natured humor to recommend it, but I'm not sure Greg Mottola really knew what he wanted to do with the lively characters he had created. He may have learned one lesson of independent film-making the hard way: it's a good start to put a bunch of interesting characters together in a vehicle and set them on their way, but sooner or later that vehicle has to come to a destination. THE DAYTRIPPERS is an entertaining ride while that vehicle is in motion. Mottola just needs to learn how to park as smoothly as he drives.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 fair excursions: 6.
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