Kasdan: The Accidental Tourist (1988)

Based on one of Anne Tyler's most popular Baltimore novels, The Accidental Tourist stars William Hurt as Macon Leary, a travel writer struggling to come to terms with the death of his twelve-year old son. After parting ways with his wife Sarah, played by Kathleen Turner, Macon moves back in with his oddball siblings, and strikes up a tentative friendship with Muriel Pritchett, a dog trainer, played by Geena Davis. What follows would play out as a fairly conventional romantic comedy were Macon not such an impoverished, monotone character, sleepwalking through every scene with a catatonic passivity that often makes the film feel more like a still life than a human drama. As the author of the bestselling “Accidental Tourist” franchise, his job is to write guides that help people feel as if they’ve never left their living room when they’re travelling, but the flipside of that is that every living room in the film feels as anonymous and desolate as mass transit, as Hurt glaciates every beat, pause and take, shrinking further into Macon’s shrivelled, withered Waspy sensibility with each scene. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that Macon’s plight can only be remedied – if remedied is even the word – through the most shrunken, shrivelled Waspy fantasy imaginable, namely a beautiful young woman who’s really only marginally less insular than he is. And as much as Muriel is touted as some kind of eccentric exception to Macon’s lifestyle, her eccentricity quickly starts to feel like a way of containing any semblance of difference, disruption or originality, a managerial strategy more than any real kind of aberration or alteration to Kasdan's faded corduroy palette. In that sense, the film plays as a fascinating, formative moment – Davis won the Academy Award for her performance – in the evolution of eccentricity as a key fetish, or fixation, of centrist 90s cinema. At times you can even glimpse the 00s, almost discern a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in Muriel’s broadband quirks and tics, only for it to succumb to Kasdan’s muffled torpor, fall back into yet another Baltimore rowhouse.