Kasdan: Darling Companion (2012)

Darling Companion concludes a loose trilogy that began with The Big Chill and Grand Canyon. Once again, Kasdan uses an ensemble cast to take stock of the baby boomer generation, building a loose, sprawling narrative in which everyone seems to be searching separately for the same thing, pursuing a series of overlapping paths that only start to constitute their destination as they converge. In this case, however, there’s less of a sense that the baby boomer generation are at the vanguard of things, or that the intended audience can extend any great distance beyond them. On the one hand, that creates a gentle kind of sadness, as Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest and Richard Jenkins seem resigned to remembering and reprising old roles, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel so late in their careers. At times, it’s as casual and gracious as a well-worn memory – most memories are, after all, sketches – while it’s often the younger cast members, especially Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass, who feel like ghosts, shadows of their parents’ younger selves. At the same time, now that there’s nothing really left for this generation to prove, Kasdan can settle into a new kind of warmth, the warmth Keaton discovers when she finds an abandoned dog on a wintry, Omaha freeway shoulder, only to lose him again at her holiday home in Telluride, setting up the search that occupies most of the film. Poised between that road shoulder and the gorgeous Rocky Mountain backdrop – the dog is actually called “Freeway,” and his name echoes out across every expanse – the whole film feels a bit like a thaw, the kind of thaw you only really experience when snow and desert meet as spectacularly as they do in these far midwestern climates. And as the film thaws out, the whole baby boomer generation is removed to an almost pastoral distance, with even their most urban and urbane memories somehow relegated to the remotest and most rarefied of wildernesses. They may not be quite mounted and set up behind glass, but they’re glassy enough that the film gradually congeals into a perfectly distilled tear, a lump in the throat, spreading out its sadness so evenly that it’s just harsh enough to be soothing, just traumatic enough to be calming.