Pun Salad

The Christmas prep season is busier than Actual Christmas, it seems, but we took a break to watch a movie. Not a good movie, but still. It was written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan. This is the same guy who wrote and directed Body Heat, Silverado, and The Big Chill back in the 1980s. He has screenplay credits for The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark! Dude, what happened here?

Plot: Beth (Diane Keaton) is married to spinal surgeon Joseph (Kevin Kline). Beth and daughter Grace (Elizabeth Moss) notice an abandoned dog off the freeway, and rescue it. Beth decides to adopt, naming the dog "Freeway". (Get it?)

Fast forward a year or so, and Grace is getting married to the vet in a beautiful Rocky Mountain setting. And then Freeway runs away while on a walk with Joseph! Bad dog! A dog hunt commences, not only by Beth and Joseph, but also including various semi-colorful barely-interesting family and friends. (Including Dianne Wiest, Richard Jenkins, Mark Duplass, and Sam Shepard).

The plot is just a clearly just a scaffold to explore the characters and their relationships. See if you can get interested in them; I couldn't. The cast is filled with acting talent (I count five Oscars and five additional nominations in the cast) but there's not much acting talent can do to save a weak plot and wooden dialog.

The DVD box features a blurb by Pete Hammond of Deadline Hollywood: "A True Gem". Looking at the source of the quote, I can't see any evidence he watched the movie.