Because of Diane Keaton alone, I will see Darling Companion again. Indeed, I’ll probably buy the DVD when it comes out (which may be very soon). Ms Keaton adds another sterling late-in-life performance to her charm bracelet, and she is assisted by an extremely engaging cast, including a never-better Dianne Wiest and a literally enchanting Ayelet Zurer. They say that Meryl Streep can play anybody, and it’s true; Diane Keaton is still, at the same age, America’s sweetheart. Every good woman in the land has something to learn from her. And every man, period.

But there is a difficulty about the movie, a difficulty that remains vague and not particularly oppressive until a scene near the end that stands in the place of a climax. Instead of a climax, it is the stuff of an anecdote that you might hear at Davos or at some other assembly of extremely wealthy people whose lives are so gated that they never brush anywhere near the portals. (Except in Manhattan, which is their recreational jungle.) Let us think back to Auntie Mame, to Gloria Upson’s saga of the ping-pong balls at the country club. “And then I said…And then she said…” Gloria represents a world in which, ordinary problems having vanished, one must make the most of ping-pong. So it is here.

The Disney version of Darling Companion would have focused on the adventures of Freeway, the runaway mutt whose disappearance causes so much angst to the human beings in his new life. Having been spotted at the side of an Interstate highway and then rescued by Beth (Ms Keaton) and her daughter, Grace (Elisabeth Moss), Freeway introduces Grace to the veterinarian whom she will marry a year later, at her parents’ Rocky Mountain vacation home. While being taken out for a walk by Joseph (Kevin Kline), Beth’s career-absorbed spinal surgeon, Freeway is seduced by the delights of the hunt when a deer lopes across the path. Joseph, fatally, is talking (about his career) on a cell phone, and he is not carrying the special orange whistle that hangs in abundant supply by the door of his chalet. That is the last we see of Freeway until the very end of the movie.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t for a moment wish to know more about Freeway’s Outward-Bound experience. I was not worried about whether he was alive or dead. Mind you, I was ticked, almost as much as Beth was, that Joseph wasn’t a very responsible pet steward; I believe that, if you are going to bring a pet into your life, then you must treat it with all the care and concern that you would give to a child (short of open-ended catastrophic medical procedures, that is, which seem unredeemedly cruel to me). A dog is not “just a dog,” once you’ve signed up to feed and shelter it. But although I loved our Labrador retrievers when I was growing up, it was a very childish and unintelligent affection, and when I grew old enough to be more mature about animals, I discovered that they didn’t interest me. So I, sitting in the darkened theatre, did not worry about Freeway. I was completely absorbed by the hunt for Freeway that ties up the six characters who remain at the Rocky Mountain lodge after Grace’s wedding to her veterinarian. (Goodbye, Elisabeth Moss!) As they hunt for the dog, the humans get to know each other better in difficult situations and become better human beings. A cast as great as this one can make you forget that you’ve seen this story before, and before and before and before.

In addition to Beth and Joseph, we had Penny (Dianne Wiest), Penny’s son (Mark Duplass) — also a spinal surgeon, and a colleague of his uncle’s back in Denver — and Penny’s new boyfriend, a dodgy-sounding entrepreneur called Russell (Richard Jenkins). Also, Carmen (Ms Zurer), the caretaker at the chalet. We could start with this detail; why not. Carmen is a ravishingly pretty half-gypsy who lives full-time at a mostly-uninhabited vacation house? (The question mark imposes itself.) And why don’t Beth and Joseph seem to know her very well? And what about the house that Beth and Joe break into when, lost in a storm while out looking for Freeway, they break a window, triggering an alarm that brings rescue to their feet? Why didn’t that house have a caretaker? Surely you don’t build a lovely faux-rustic trianon in the middle of highly scenic nowhere only to shut off the power and water when you’re not around, entrusting your property to the ministrations of a silent alarm. That’s what — that’s what ordinary people would do.

Ms Keaton and Mr Kline play Beth and Joseph, right up until the would-be climax, as ordinary, accessible overachievers; if you went to college anywhere, the odds are that there was a couple just like them in your class. But Lawrence Kasdan, who directs the film and who wrote it with his wife, Meg, have appliquéd ordinary Beth and Joe onto the very extraordinary lifestyle of Hollywood producers (Mr Kasdan is also a co-producer of Darling Companion). So when, instead of climax we must have anecdote, Beth and Joseph (and the rest of their party, which also gets an assist on the ground from Sam Shepard’s crusty sherriff) resort to criminal deception, violating five or six statutes governing civil aviation. You had to be there when this story was told the first time. In the movie’s lavish re-telling, the incident is not only unfunny but creepily narcissistic.  

We are all familiar with the concept of the train wreck, the movie that is so botched that it’s actually entertaining, as long as you can make your mind squint until verisimilitude is no longer an issue. (My favorite train wreck is Merci Docteur Rey, also starring Dianne Wiest.)  Darling Companion, also entertaining (the actors make sure of that), is another kind of disaster, the movie ruined by one single miscalculation. Mr Kasdan invested a great deal of skill and taste as well as money in Darling Companion, but he was mistaken about being able to make it fly.

***

I was right to finish my mention of tonight’s Carnegie Hall tickets, in the daily entry at Civil Pleasures, with a question mark  The weather’s grisly — penetrating and wet, worse, as far as I’m concerned, than snowfall at thirty degrees cooler — and I want to be sure not to miss any of this weekend’s events (more parties). My streak of concert cancellations this season has been unprecedented, to the extent that I’m wondering if I ought to renew any of my subscriptions. I’m even thinking about dropping Orpheus, which I’ll be missing on Saturday night because I’d rather go to a cocktail party. (Ms NOLA will take the tickets, and I know that she’ll have a good time, so I don’t feel any sense of waste. Tonight’s tickets, for a performance Dvorak’s Stabat Mater, are another matter, although I didn’t so much as buy them as take them along with good seats for Messiah at Christmas.) Increasingly, I don’t want to go out at night unless it’s to spend time with friends — and I don’t mean sitting still with friends.

The iPod playlists are undoubtedly to blame for my dismal attendance record. They have filled my brain with music that I never knew as well as I do now. Just this afternoon, I noticed that one little dance in Bach’s fourth French Suite takes for its theme a figure buried in the counterpoint of the preceding number. I realized that I knew that it was going to happen; I had heard the keyboard suites so many times in the past year that, even though I have to stop and think, which one is this?, I not only knew what was coming next but grasped that I was listening to a kind of prelude. In short, I am not hungry to hear music, and, because the playlists have made it possible for me to get to know multiple performances of many works very well — something that, as I’ve written elsewhere, was hard to achieve in the era of the LP, when every piece of music (or every record, at least) had to be physically chosen, thus putting a premium on “bests” and “favorites” — the music that I listen to at home is as varied as the music that I would hear in a concert hall. I wonder how much of what I’m saying makes sense to anyone interested in music, but not in classical music.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2012 at 10:43 am.