the accidental tourist anne tyler summary

We notice Muriel’s eyes and demeanor, though, immediately drawn to this handsome man and taken by his manner of speaking and his pure emotional honesty. The chemistry between Macon and Muriel – between Hurt and Davis – is palpable right from the start, though the grieving Macon is unable to see it. This is most apparent in the first encounter between Macon and Muriel Pritchett (Davis), the canine trainer whose kennel boards Macon’s dog Edward when Macon must take one of his trips to write a new guidebook. as Macon’s idiosyncratic siblings), we fall into the unique and downright huggable rhythms of these people. Simply through the performances by Hurt and Turner, and Geena Davis as another significant character (as well as Amy Wright, David Ogden Stiers and Ed Begley Jr. We chuckle and smile upon recognizing the natures of these characters and their witty and sometimes sardonic interactions, but we aren’t meant to guffaw at slapstick or scatology. The set-up perhaps doesn’t pass the smell test of comic potential, but as scripted by Kasdan and Frank Galati, the movie is a comedy about people rather than their situations. To put the nail in the coffin, Sarah announces one morning that she is leaving Macon and has rented an apartment in the city.

Ethan was the lone victim of an armed robbery, and Macon is still haunted by the fatherhood of which he was cheated by total chance. Adapted from Anne Tyler’s novel of the same name, the film follows Macon Leary (William Hurt), an author of travel guidebooks whose marriage to Sarah (Kathleen Turner) is slowly disintegrating a year after the murder of their son Ethan. Kasdan, the great filmmaker behind 1983’s The Big Chill and 1991’s Grand Canyon, is the reason for this expertly executed tightrope walk.

Scenes of purely human comedy and tragedy with a tempo as relaxed and unpredictable as life itself play against the backdrop of a story about grief and, in some ways, coming back to the land of the living. Kasdan’s film is so impossibly well-managed tonally that one finishes it in a kind of daze. The late, great Roger Ebert once called Lawrence Kasdan’s 1988 drama The Accidental Tourist, the most delightful film of the year, but “also seemingly one of the most depressing.” That’s an accurate description of this gentle and sympathetic comedy about a man mourning the loss of his son.

The accidental tourist anne tyler summary