HOUSESITTER
With Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn, Dana Delany, Julie Harris, Donald Moffat, Peter MacNicol, Richard B. Shull, Laurel Cronin, Roy Cooper, and Christopher Durang.
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In Housesitter nearly all the lies relate explicitly to marriage and implicitly to class. But before we get to the lies, we’re treated to a prologue. Newton Davis (Steve Martin), an unfulfilled Boston architect, presents a literally gift-wrapped house he designed and built in their New England hometown of Dobbs Mill to Becky (Dana Delany), the woman he loves, as a marriage proposal, and she promptly turns him down. Three months later, still in love with Becky, he meets Gwen (Goldie Hawn), a waitress at a Hungarian restaurant in Boston, and spends the night with her in her apartment. That evening he shows her a sketch on a cocktail napkin of the house he built for Becky, noting that he hasn’t yet sold it and that it’s still standing there empty. End of prologue.
Most of Gwen’s lies are outlandish improvisations that lead to other inventions. She tells Becky that she and Newton met in a hospital, that her face was all bandaged up because of a hit-and-run auto accident, and that they made love and even went through the wedding ceremony before the doctor removed the gauze. She also mentions that Newton paid her medical bills. When Becky, knowing that he had to borrow money to build their prospective dream house, asks her how Newton could afford it, Gwen invents another lie about Newton getting a promotion at his architectural firm.
Steve Martin can’t do much with his character either, but only because he, like Robin Williams, seems to have forsaken some of the wilder aspects of his original comic persona for the blander, cornier characters that tend to figure in more commercially successful movies. (Similarly, Peter MacNicol makes Newton’s friend at work look and sound as much as possible like Billy Crystal, on the apparent assumption that familiarity breeds box-office receipts.) Fortunately, Martin has more success than usual drawing on his physical resources to give his uninteresting character some zany punctuations. Shortly after he enters his fully furnished house for the first time, he slips on the floor, falls over a sofa, and lands squarely on his feet with the kind of beautiful aplomb that, if memory serves, he last showed doing somersaults on a baseball field in Parenthood.
