Darling Companion's Fetching Marriages The bucolic look of Lawrence Kasdan's Darling Companion is an indication of its fine sensibility. Kasdan evokes the natural, wooded landscape of Alfred Hitchcock's idiosyncratic comedy The Trouble with Harry. The colors here are not autumnal nor quite as vibrant yet Kasdan affects a similar tone of respite. His three harried couples (Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline, Richard Jensen and Diane Wiest, Mark Duplass and Ayelet Zurer) explore the communication tensions of love relationships?respectively from habitual complacency and mature passion to first attraction. It is a lightly charming, minor film. One would like to praise Kasdan for making an awesome comeback but the gentle insights and genial tone of Darling Companion merely pick up where Kasdan left off with the immensely appealing (though slight) mystery, Mumford?the best film of its kind since John Cromwell's Small Town Story. Kasdan is not a master of provincial etiquette and amiable social conflicts, he's just one of the few contemporary filmmakers interested in such niceties. With nothing profound to say about marriage or parent-child relationships, Kasdan (who co-write the script with his wife Meg Kasdan) at least says it calmly and without the self-congratulation of a lewd, immature, Judd Apatow wallow. Darling Companion is conceived around the man's-best-friend conceit of middle-aged Beth (Keaton) adopting a dog to take up the void caused by husband Joseph's (Kline) involvement with his medical practice. At a retreat in the woods, the three couples search for the runaway dog becomes a exploration of their own intimacies, dependencies and misconnections. The conceit is thoughtful, if not quite sophisticated. It never rises to the remarkable level of the affecting man/pet metaphor in We Think the World of You where Alan Bates memorably acted out prudent gay desires of the pre-Stonewall era. Instead, this is Kasdan's typical middle-class circle game as in The Big Chill. But occasionally Kasdan tips into profundity with Zurer's claims of clairvoyant intuition or the sense of faithfulness embodied in the searchers all wearing red dog whistles the way early Christians carried fish signs. (Kasdan's cutest metaphor has the bickering Keaton and Kline getting lost in the woods and encountering a pair of rams.) To read the full article at CityArts [click here](http://cityarts.info/2012/04/20/little-sheba-comes-back/).
