Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline star as Beth and Joseph, a married couple with a bit of empty nest syndrome. Joseph is an uptight surgeon who has no patience for Beth’s high-strung disposition and emotional outbursts, so he’s especially annoyed when she rescues a dog, which becomes the light of her life. While marrying off their remaining single daughter (Elizabeth Moss) at their vacation home in the mountains, Joseph loses the dog during a walk in the woods. Naturally, this sends Beth into a tailspin, so everyone bands together to form a search party. This group includes Joseph’s crunchy granola sister, Penny (Dianne Wiest), her questionable new boyfriend, Russell (Richard Jenkins), Penny’s son Bryan (Mark Duplass), and a gypsy wedding coordinator named Carmen (Ayelet Zurer), who sends the group on countless wild goose chases, based on her “visions.”
Oh, not that it really matters, but the great Sam Shepard plays a not particularly interesting, bumbling sheriff.
As silly as it seems, this premise actually could’ve been a great vehicle for character development and conflict resolution. People wandering around the woods, contemplating life, being honest, facing challenges, learning through adversity, yada yada yada. And it seemed like it was going somewhere at first. But, alas, much like the gypsy’s visions, and a child's or elderly person’s ramblings, it really went nowhere.
Now I, personally, don’t think of the stellar cast as elderly – they’re actually some of my favorites -- but the script sort of treated them as such. It seems as though they were spoonfed bland, easily digestible roles, then sent off to scuttle about in the woods for a couple of days. It was sort of sweet, in a benign and syrupy way, but there were no… pancakes under all that syrup. Ugh, so who served us this plate of pancake-less syrup? That would be writer/director Lawrence Kasden, of The Big Chill and Raiders of the Lost Ark fame.
Say, what?
I’d like to blame Hollywood’s ageism for this waste of an amazing, albeit “mature” cast, but the fault, in my opinion, sits squarely on Kasden’s shoulders. He’s not only capable of more, but being that he’s a sextagenarian like the cast, you'd think he’d be more motivated to represent his peeps a little better. These people are still way too talented to be happy just to be seen. But I guess in Hollywood, it’s better to be patronized than totally ignored.
Sad.
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