Hope Davis wants to go on a simple quest to find out whether husband has been cheating on her but finds the matter complicated when her parents, sister, and sister's boyfriend all decide to tag along in 1996's The Daytrippers. The ensuing story is a pleasant, mild, holiday diversion.
After Thanksgiving, Eliza (Davis) goes home with her husband Louis (Stanley Tucci) and the two make love.
And I thought, wow, ain't Stanley Tucci a lucky son of a gun. The balding man with average looks somehow got this knockout. But, of course, this was the era when the cheating fictional husband typically wore his inner corruption on the outside.
Meanwhile, Eliza's little sister, Jo (Parker Posey), is with her boyfriend, Carl (Liev Schreiber), staying at their parents' house. When Eliza brings them the clue she found, a love letter quoting Andrew Marvell, Rita (Anne Meara), Eliza and Jo's mother, decides they should all pile into the car and head into the city and find out just what Louis is up to.
Rita is a spectator who is unconcerned with her lack of more than superficial understanding of any of the various people and situations they encounter in the city. Carl, who's in the process of finishing his first novel, frequently pontificates with shallow opinions, at one point mentioning how the middle class is anaesthetised by tabloid media. Oh, for the days when America had a sizable middle class. You don't know how good you have it, Carl. Anyway, the shoe seems to fit Rita in this case.
But although she leads the charge, she's not the focus of the film which persistently maintains a light touch, never allowing any of the little plot threads to get a firm grip, quite intentionally. Life is too messy for any drama to take up the space it might want to. Rita faints in the street and Carl prevails upon a young man to let them into his apartment so she can rest. They discover a little drama involving the man's father who's kind of a prick, but then also kind of a nice guy, at first demanding to know why strangers are in his home and then offering them all lunch and wine. This little episode is followed by a party where Jo finds herself tempted to cheat with a less obnoxious author.
Carl keeps talking about Andrew Marvell as an "Elizabethan poet" and "predecessor of Shakespeare" though Marvell was in fact born years after Shakespeare and Elizabeth I were already dead. I'm not sure if this was Carl's mistake or the filmmakers'. I'm tempted to think it's the latter since what would be the point of introducing a mistake that only the random 17th literary nerd like me would catch? My point is, she should be dating me.
The writing is mainly strong, though, with its deliberately light but canny touch and its credible characters in mildly incredible situations. Hope Davis and Parker Posey are both gorgeous and captivating.
The Daytrippers is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a Parker Posey collection.
