The Accidental Tourist

Hey, finally!  A movie that isn’t hyperemotional. If you want a quiet character study, in which the themes are grief, miscommunication, and martial separation, we hold out The Accidental Tourist to you.  This movie was a welcome relief to us, since we’ve been bombarded all our lives by outrageous characters, flashy effects, soaring music, and basically anything else that will get our attention.

Here there are no outrageous characters, only well-developed ones.  The main one, Macon Leary, writes travel books for businessmen.  Just like his customers, Leary does not like to travel, which means there’s a low-level reluctance to do what his job requires.  Yet give advice he does, but only in print.  The movie opens with Leary’s wife revealing to him that she wants a divorce.  The couple has undergone great stress in the last year, ever since their only son was killed in an armed robbery.

So Leary is left alone in a large house, with a dog named Edward, who (watch how the camera does this) is a main character in his own right.  Edward grieves too, and in a chance meeting, Leary runs into a dogtrainer named Muriel Pritchett.  Pritchett begins to train the dog to sit and be silent.  She is aggressive and assertive, but makes offers with no-strings-attached.  Leary does not want to see her, then he does not want to go to dinner, and then . . . he finds himself being slowly trained by her.

This story is not formulaic, and once Leary and Pritchett find a bit of joy in one another, we proceed to further complications involving Leary’s wife.  The key in this story is Leary’s motivations and culpability.  His character flaws are obvious, which makes you constantly question his judgment.  And yet you see him pulled into numerous situations which he was reluctant to enter to begin with — just like his job as a travel writer.  Every word that Leary utters is complicated by every circumstance he is in, every bit of information he knows, every character he is around.  The same can be said for all of the minor characters, too, and that’s what makes this a good movie.  (The subplots, not mentioned here, do great work too.)

There are two flaws.  The first one is formal.  Since the subjects at hand are love and marriage, the absence of Christ as the only firm anchor in marriage is obvious.  The movie is necessarily sad, though it contains a wide range of tones within that sadness.  We bring up this point just to bring it up.  You, dear, mature reader, can find plenty worthwhile material to discuss in this movie.  Between the two of us, we chatted during the entire movie about character motivations and complexities.  That’s a good thing.

But then the other flaw.  John Williams scored the movie.  For all the accolades this guy gets, we can’t understand why people don’t point out that he also ruins movies!  He comes close here.  His little six-note theme plays over and over and over and over and over again.  And over again and over again.  Six notes, repeatedly.  Did he score this movie for torture chambers?

Even worse, Williams has a bad habit of swelling music in certain scenes that do not need swelling music at all.  Swelling music is fine for action-adventure movies, which is what Williams is so well known for.  But in a multi-toned, emotionally complicated movie like this, you can’t swell the music in the final scene!  Argggghhhh.  The fact that Williams made an enormous musical crescendo in the last twenty seconds shows that he understood nothing about the movie.  We do not need a Star Wars finale to The Accidental Tourist.  So you have been warned about the last twenty seconds.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 7

Morality: 3? Or 7?  Somewhere in there.