THE DAYTRIPPERS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1997 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: After a woman finds a love poem among
her husbands things, she and her whole family spend
a trying day in Manhattan looking for the husband
and playing detective. The ultra-low budget
comedy- drama has a few nice moments, some
pointless-seeming sequences, and finally seems to
run out of film just when the story starts.
Rating: 0 (-4 to +4)
New York Critics: 13 positive, 0 negative, 5 mixed
THE DAYTRIPPERS has the feel of a story written in a PC. It starts as scenario that can be described in two or three sentences. But that is too short to make a film so sequences are added one at a time like Christmas decorations on a tree to pad the scenario until there is enough there to fill out a script. Some of the added sequences interconnect, most do not. Mostly you take the scenic route through the original three sentences, learning about the people traveling with you and some of the people you pass along the way. In the end the value of the whole comprises very little more than the sum of the value of the parts. It is apparently writer/director Greg Mottola's belief that if you see the characters in enough disconnected situations you will see sufficient facets of their personality to come to understand them. Perhaps there is some truth to that, but one wants more of a story than is provided here.
Eliza (played by Hope Davis) and Louis (Stanley Tucci) are a comfortable suburban couple living not far from Eliza's parents Rita (Anne Meara) and Jim (Pat McNamara). Eliza teaches fourth grade and Louis is an executive at a Manhattan-based book publisher. Then on the day after Thanksgiving, Eliza finds an Andrew Marvell love poem that has fallen out of Louis's pocket. Asking Rita for advice, her mother suggests going into Manhattan and confronting Louis directly. And the more people for support the better. So Eliza, her parents, her sister Jo (Parker Posey) and her sister's boyfriend Carl (Liev Schreiber) all go trooping off in the family station wagon to Manhattan to find Louis and hopefully the truth. It is a trying day in the city for each of them as well as some of the people in Manhattan that they involve. Along the way they have various small adventures, but the adventures are not very interesting in themselves, do not tell us a lot about the family members, and do not advance the plot. Much of this film is picking up on the texture of the characters, which is a bit threadbare, and waiting for something to happen. We get validation of our first impressions that Rita is a meddling busybody. There is confirmation that Jim is a long-suffering father who really is a font of wisdom if people would only notice and listen to him. We see that Jo is not as ready to commit to Carl as she thinks she is. And Carl, the writer, is really just a big fish in a small intellectual pond. We get something of how he thinks as he recounts in detail the plot of his novel, a rather simplistic symbolic work about a man with the head of a dog. (Curiously the release of this film seems to coincide with the publication of a real novel that would seem to have some similarities to his fictional novel: Kirsten Bakis's LIVES OF THE MONSTER DOGS.)
Anne Meara actually does a fairly good job as the overbearing Rita. In many ways she is more believable than Debbie Reynolds was in MOTHER. The film does not make adequate use of Pat McNamara who really makes the film come alive when he is given anything to do. Parker Posey who at one time seemed to overpower her roles intentionally gives a somewhat more subdued performance in this as she did in WAITING FOR GUFFMAN. Director Mottola seems to be keeping an eye on expenses as is producer Steven Soderbergh, whose films tend to be simple actors in front of a camera. The score is apparently done on a single guitar. Perhaps it was just the quality of the print I saw, but the colors were a little washed out.
By structuring his story so that the most interesting events fall in the very latest part of the film Mottola makes his film at once too long and one that the viewer is hoping will not end when it does. This is a film for the patient. I rate it a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
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