home
| art & architecture | books & cds | dance
| destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives
|
Ben Kleinman (Paul Reiser)
lives in New York City with his wife Rachel (Elizabeth Perkins) and daughter. He has three
married sisters who live with their families in the suburbs, but are all connected at the
hip thanks to the telephonic genius of conference calling. Their father Sam Kleinman
(Peter Falk) turns up at Ben’s door one evening without his wife Muriel (Olympia
Dukakis). Something is wrong.
Muriel has left her husband of nearly fifty years. She left a written
note on the refrigerator door, no phone number, no forwarding address. Everyone is
surprised. No one is surprised. The Kleinman clan begins its investigations, analyzing
their parents’ relationship, looking for clues by spinning out one scenario after
another. Dad had this coming to him. Who could have seen this coming? Whaddaya gonna do,
hmm?
Sam was on his way to look at buying a country farmhouse--his wife, he
thinks, has her heart set on living in the country. So, what the hell, why not take Dad
along? It’ll be good for him, distract him, take his mind off things, and give Sam
and Ben the chance to go on a father-and-son buddies-bonding on-the-road trip. As father
and son come to know each other better, they come to understand their own relationship
with their absent wife and mother.
As the characters spar and joust and fight and love their way through
the autumn foliage of upstate New York (much of the film is shot in the Catskills), they
seem to see more clearly, and lovingly into each other’s hearts. Reiser seems to have
intended this film as a Valentine’s Day card for his own parents, perhaps as he
remembers them, or idealized in the ways people typically wish their parents had been.
Screenwriter Reiser pays close attention to details of personality
quirks, regional dialects, domestic interiors, and rural countrysides, imbuing each
environment with shades of sweet nostalgia. The film is strongest in its loving details of
this New York Jewish family, this look back at the post-war generations. It works well as
an affectionate leave-taking at the start of the twenty-first century. However, Reiser
gets the rural dialect wrong and his sentimentalized vision of upstate rustics and their
Saturday night baseball games and bar brawl culture may be offensive to some viewers.
As a film about family relations this one does not disappoint. As a
slightly self-indulgent study of New Yorkers looking at themselves, it will charm. An
analysis of the psycho-dynamics of divorce it isn’t. So, whaddaya gonna do? Maybe sit
down and enjoy it like a warm bowl of matzo ball soup on a late November afternoon.
- Les Wright
