A scene from Darling Companion

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 Dianne Wiest, Mark Duplass and Ayelet Zurer) explore the communication tensions of love relationships, from habitual complacency and mature passion to first attraction, respectively. 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) 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 her husband’s (Kline) involvement with his medical practice. At a retreat in the woods, the three couples’ search for the runaway dog becomes an 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 the 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.)

Without the profundity of Mike Leigh’s middle-age exploration Another Year or the classical form of the Warren Beatty farce Town and Country, Kasdan comes off second rate. It has none of the outright satire of Wanderlust, only a sensitive, more mature sense of quietude and resolve.

It’s an old man’s movie (Kasdan is 63), which makes it a blessed rarity in today’s film culture. Finding comfort and fair-exchange value in the compromises that mature couples make, Darling Companion answers back the anxieties that once haunted the middle class, as in William Inge’s archetypal domestic melodrama Come Back, Little Sheba. Kasdan attempts to use his sensitivity about humans and knowledge of life to create a sane entertainment.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Philip Seymour Hoffman stars in Charlie Kafuman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York.

(Hoffman) parades all of Kaufman’s neuroses: sexual frustration, creative surfeit (not a creative block), body hatred and celebrity paranoia. What’s missing is universality; that’s swallowed up by Kaufman’s intellectual egomania. Caden goes from re-staging Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman as a yuppie’s geriatric nightmare performed by twenty-somethings to mounting big-budget surrealistic art movies on a mammoth soundstage. This advertises Kaufman’s distance from Miller’s sentimentality while congratulating hipsters for their cynical whimsy—and their ignorance of Fellini’s 8 1/2. In Synedoche, Kaufman has been afforded a privilege he doesn’t deserve; his unimaginative imagery never comes close to the magnificence that visionary director John Moore creates in the turbulent tableaux of Max Payne.
Kaufman’s artiness ignores political reality—further congratulating hipsters who prefer Todd Haynes-style narcissism to Todd Solondz’s humane sociological explorations (Kaufman imitates both). This is exactly the overboard pomposity Kaufman threatened in his first scripts, Malkovich and Human Nature. Passing off egghead neurasthenia as genius, Kaufman makes Caden so convinced he’s dying that in addition to seizures, he breaks out in sores. It’s even suggested that Caden’s divorce from Catherine Keener is a projection of his own death wish—like the male/female, young/old doppelganger characters who hound and perplex him. When Kaufman delivers Caden’s final, bleak message—“Everyone is everyone. You’re Ellen and all her meager sadness”—I longed for the days when a Woody Allen character “made a meager living selling meagers.”
Pity those nerds and fashion-sheep who’ll waste time trying to connect Kaufman’s symbols, cite the many David Lynch references and puzzle for ways to use “synecdoche” in daily conversation. Also pity the very good actresses—Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Samantha Morton and Dianne Wiest—who Kaufman convinced to appear dumpy and repulsive. They also had to work with Le Hoffman.
–
Synecdoche, New York
Directed by Charlie Kaufman, Running Time: 124 min.
–