THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST
With William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Geena Davis, Amy Wright, David Ogden Stiers, Ed Begley Jr., and Bill Pullman.
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Ever since Manhattan a decade ago, in which Woody Allen redid the finale of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights in order to invert and defuse its powerful dynamics (by scaling down the feeling in the huge close-ups of the hero), emotional impotence has been something of a badge of authenticity in the “serious” American cinema. Before that, the capacity to feel and express things deeply is what ennobled the American actor, from Chaplin to Brando. Even the poker-faced endurance of a Buster Keaton or a Gary Cooper was largely a matter of facial expression rather than body language: their bodies were anything but emotionless or inexpressive. The stoicism of the heroes of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and John Huston (along with those of Hammett, Hemingway, and Chandler) never derived from an absence of feeling but from something closer to the reverse–an excess of sentiment that made a tight-lipped fortitude necessary in order to sustain some measure of authority and control.
The lack of feeling shown by Macon Leary (William Hurt) in The Accidental Tourist is supposedly motivated by personal grief–over the murder of his 12-year-old son by a holdup man–but this event and the feelings stemming from it are located safely in the past, and the movie pointedly refrains from showing either the event or much of the grief, which it touches on only in an elliptical flashback. The significantly named Leary, based in Baltimore, writes travel guidebooks for executives who don’t like to travel, offering advice on how to minimize the foreignness of places they must go. It’s a subject with great satiric possibilities, but satire isn’t really germane to this movie’s agenda, which makes use of Leary’s profession metaphorically rather than sociologically to epitomize his own leeriness of life in general.
My own lack of response to Macon, in contrast to many others in the audience at Water Tower, probably stems from a certain old-fashioned attitude that regards slugs as subjects lacking in dramatic interest. It certainly isn’t the fault of William Hurt, an expressive actor elsewhere, any more than the deep-freeze nature of the protagonist of Woody Allen’s Another Woman is the fault of the great Gena Rowlands. My lack of interest in all the other characters in The Accidental Tourist, dog included, may come from my inability to share their passionate interest in Macon, which the movie represents as their major activity as well as their principal raison d’etre. (As far as we can see, Julian publishes no books except Macon’s, Muriel has no other customers as a dog trainer, Sarah has no other lovers, and his brothers and sister–apart from Rose’s romance with Julian–have no other activity except keeping house for him.) This is another reason the film can’t do much with satire: its own tunnel vision is too close to that of Macon and the travel books he writes.
