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The Accidental Tourist
William Hurt delivers such a staggering, moving performance in The Accidental Tourist that it is nearly detrimental to the film. Let me get this out of the way now: This is absolutely one of the finest performances that I have ever seen in any film, period. It is so good that what happens to Hurt in the film is secondary to our compulsion to watch the film happen to him. Above all other things, The Accidental Tourist is about overcoming the grief of death, and Hurt takes the notion of this small film and turns it into an epic of human feelings—a complete revelation of just how far grief can reach and how sometimes, “overcoming” is not just difficult, but nearly impossible. We can’t take our eyes off of Hurt throughout this ordeal, and the final scene, though it is probably a perfect ending, seems like an immense disappointment because we don’t want to leave Hurt’s character. Just one more scene, please. I could see myself making this request, for just one more scene, for many hours after the film’s completion. It is difficult to describe to you just how well Hurt manages to find a home in the character of Macon Leary. The effectiveness in his performance transcends words and lives somewhere in our souls. Here’s as good of an example as any: At one point, Macon is asked to identify the body of his son, murdered savagely in a gas station hold up. The look on Hurt’s face as he gazes at his dead son—the blank, icy words of confirmation that yes, this is his son, reminded me of the reason I began a love affair with cinema so many years ago: Because of the way that it can, like the greatest of all art, take a single moment in time—a solitary spoken word or action—and make it simultaneously attainable and impenetrable. Hurt does that here, conveying a clear sense of loss and a bottomless vacuum of emotions all at once. There is no typical Hollywood sentiment here, telling you how you are supposed to feel through music, or slow motion, or the like. All of our emotion is created genuinely by watching Hurt: We know why he is mourning, but the depth of his pain is something cannot understand unless we have experienced his loss. Yet as we watch him, we want to help him, want to understand. It’s an inexplicable tug-of-war within us, and it is all centered on Hurt’s masterful way of communicating human emotion without ever trying to define or pigeonhole it. That’s the magic of cinema. I am reminded of another stirring performance from the same era: I recently revisited the bonafied cult-classic Highlander, starring Christopher Lambert a 500-year old immortal who accepts the loss of loved ones as an element in his life as common as ham sandwiches. The film’s premise is so different and fantastical that it probably doesn’t compare effectively to The Accidental Tourist, which is an Academy Award-winning film based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Anne Tyler, but the performances seem linked at the soul. Both men have isolated themselves from their loved ones, both have clicked off life and experience existence on autopilot, both pour themselves into their work in a desperate struggle to forget their pain, and both spend a great deal of time staring longingly at framed pictures of their deceased loved ones. Both are also played by superb actors who are able to emit the highest possible of emotion and depth by portraying the least amount of physical activity and visible sentiment as possible. Though Lambert clearly loses in terms of the quality of his films (Highlander, of course, was a delightful exception), I admire him and Hurt about equally because they are both leaders in the subtle, less-is-more, iceberg approach to acting. With a flick of an eyebrow or the sniff of a nostril, both actors are able to perfectly communicate their characters to their audience and reveal their depth as artists. It is worth noting—and it is perhaps academically important to realize—how both actors portrayed their similar grief so differently: In Highlander, Lambert is sarcastic, rude, and masks his depth within his five o’clock shadow as he deals with his loss, but he is essentially the same person that he has always been, only a little more bitter and depressed. He is not without humor and devotion to his principles, but watch the way his hand occasionally trembles, or the way he sits at a sports arena with such passive apathy, completely drowned in his thoughts, or how he sniffs a glass of two-hundred year old wine and just—remembers. He is a man who makes no apologies and no excuses for his grief; he recognizes it, and damn it all, he kind of likes it. Hurt’s Macon, on the other hand, is living in denial. He is a total basket case, and his grief is so all-consuming that he has to remind himself that depression is present at all, and that it is abnormal and slowly killing him. Watch Hurt very carefully, look into his eyes as he goes about his day—the way he shuffles down the street, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slouched. The way he avoids meaningful conversations with anyone. The way he even carefully walks his dog, as if this little creature is his only confident and friend. His routine has become his surrogate-savior—the only thing that is keeping him from collapsing on the floor and staying there forever, crushed under the weight of his despair. All this might seem like I’m chasing a rabbit, but I compare the two performances because I think one helps to demonstrate the effectiveness of the other. They sort of serve like the yin and yang for coping with loss—one becomes one with his grief, the other is on the verge of drowning in it (because their acting methods are so similar, I would at least be intrigued to see Hurt and Lambert share a film credit sometime). Still, I think that the nature of Highlander allows Lambert creates a tragic god of Shakespearian proportions—a literary exaggeration of the real thing comparable to Hamlet or Titus Andronicus. As a result, it is ultimately Hurt who creates the character that we want to linger with longer, who we connect with on a greater scale. The Accidental Tourist reveals Hurt’s ability in seamlessly bridging the gap between fiction and the audience’s reaction to it. His angst is so complete that it is nearly a direct assault on our own emotions, forcing us to want to peer deeper into this man as we root for him and struggle with him. The plot centers itself around Macon and hopes, I think, to take him on his journey towards overcoming grief without directly dealing with the direct process of overcoming. Because of the depth of his sadness, this is enough. Macon is the bestselling author of a series of travel guides that are for people who literally hate international traveling. He advises his readers what hotels to stay in and restaurants to visit while stuck in business trips in, say, Paris or Berlin, to make it seem like you haven’t left your hometown. His books are a metaphor for his life: He is unwilling, even as his grief demands that he changes and attempts to move him along to reconciliation, to surround himself with anything but those things that remind him of his son’s death. Macon’s wife (Kathleen Turner) is so emotionally strained at his attempts to smother his pain that the film opens with her announcement that she wants a divorce. Macon accepts it passively, as he accepts everything else. The rest of the film concerns his attempts to juggle his divorce with his rather depressing job, his bizarre siblings (two brothers and a sister, all who have never married) who alphabetize their canned goods and never answer the phone (“We never do unless we know who it is, but we don’t see the point in answering machines either”), and a love affair with an air-headed but surprisingly insightful dog trainer (Gena Davis, who won an Oscar for the role) who believes she can help him by taking him under her wing and, while she’s at it, provide her son with a father figure. The story takes its time and sometimes seems to grind to a complete halt, but never mind—it exists to create an opportunity to present the utterly fascinating character that Hurt provides. Director Lawrence Kasdan (who also directed Hurt in Body Heat and The Big Chill and knows how to utilize the actor to create a convincing sense of longingness) understands that the entire film rests upon Hurt, and he essentially turns the entire exercise into a quiet, meditative series of interactions between Macon and the other principle characters, including Turner, Davis, and Bill Pullman as Macon’s boss. Each interaction seemingly moves Macon along towards recovery, and because he moves at a snail’s pace, so does the film. Yet The Accidental Tourist is never boring or intolerable in its slowness, because a faster pace would be inconsistent to the tone that Hurt creates with Macon. The film ultimately boils down to two crucial scenes which allow Macon, for the first time since his son’s death, to completely, honestly confront his depression. The first comes about midway, between him and Davis. It is a perfect, simple scene in which the ice finally starts to crack. The second comes at the end between him and Turner, in which Macon is able to verbalize the steps he needs to finally find peace. The journey taken between these two scenes leads to a choice that Macon makes that I’m not sure that I entirely agree with, but then, this film isn’t about me or my choice. This is about Macon, and his steps towards recovery. By the end of the film, we see that recovery has begun. The film has no reason to continue, but Hurt’s performance is so careful and brilliantly conceived that I was sad to see the credits start rolling. It was sad to leave Macon, after the emotional connection that I established with him. I’m still sad. Cast: A film by Warner Brothers. Directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Written by Kasdan Frank Galati, from the novel by Anne Tyler. Rated PG, for brief language and innuendo. Running time: 121 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: December 23, 1988. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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