Director: Lawrence Kasdan
Year Released: 1988
Rating: 1.0
Catchy title, yes, enduring story, hell no: director Lawrence Kasdan tries for a quiet study of loss and sadness and churns out a sluggish mess of a movie, one in which everything fits into a nice neat package you. If you've seen any number of movies, can figure out how things will turn out by the half-hour mark. It also seems a tad too closely related to Redford's Ordinary People, which I kept mentally comparing it to during my screening (Ordinary People being, to me, a masterpiece). William Hurt, as glib as ever, loses son to a bullet in the head, wife in divorce, and is stuck with a schizo dog named Edward who, I think, for Kasdan, represents something significant (it was in the first part that I thought the film was veering into De Sica/Umberto D territory ... three words: don't go there). Conveniently, however, he meets a twitchy woman at a dog store (Geena Davis, with googly eyes and a mouth squeezed shut) who falls for him, and who he consistently rebuffs because he's-got-healing-to-do-in-private. Elsewhere, there are sub-plots dangling about in never-never land that fail to amount to anything remotely substantial (involving Hurt's old maid sister and two incompetent brothers) despite being slightly relevant and the movie is slowly, slowly, slowly moved ahead by Hurt's making up his damn mind as to what he wants in life. Conveniently, again, his first wife, who left him (Kathleen Turner, very good), pops back up, and he needs to decide between her and Geena Davis. Before he picks Davis (expected, predictable), he tortures her first, playing cruel games with her character, ignoring her, hanging up on her, etc. The title refers to a travel guide Hurt's character writes for, explaining how to avoid unexpected hitches when wandering far from home, and this, oh yes, is a metaphor for life which Kasdan conveniently points out to you in a quiet monologue by Hurt, just in case you didn't get it the first dozen times. Davis, incidentally, won an Oscar for her dog-trainer character - who turns the angry, hostile Edward into a normal, good-ol' pup - thereby fulfilling the Devil's part of their mutual contract.
