Two stars. Rated PG-13, for sexual candor and drug content
By Derrick Bang
This feels like a Reader’s Digest Condensed Movie. And not
a very good one.
Although blessed with occasional
charm and a fair number of well-delivered verbal zingers, And So It Goes is destined for instant oblivion. The premise is
strictly TV sitcom lite, the delivery by the numbers, the outcome completely
predictable.
 |
| When Oren (Michael Douglas) gets saddled with a granddaughter he didn't even know existed, he asks next-door neighbor Leah (Diane Keaton) to watch the girl. For an unspecified period of time. Which Leah improbably agrees to do, despite having very little use for Oren. Which makes about as much sense as anything else in this dim-bulb flick. |
In one respect, this gentle
rom-com is a breath of fresh air: a (mostly) family-friendly affair designed
for older viewers who will appreciate seeing pros such as Michael Douglas,
Diane Keaton and Frances Sternhagen do what they do best. By simple virtue of
offering an alternative to summer’s noisy, vacuous popcorn flicks, this film
should enjoy a reasonable opening weekend.
After that, sadly, word of mouth
will bury it completely.
I simply cannot believe that this
clumsy mess comes from director Rob Reiner and scripter Mark Andrus. The former
has a string of hits going back to Stand
By Me, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally; the latter earned
a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for co-scripting 1997’s As Good As It Gets, and then went on to
write 2001’s marvelous Life As a House.
Point being, both Reiner and
Andrus excel at whimsical, multi-character dramedies with a bit of bite; it’s
their bread and butter. So what they heck went wrong this time?
And So It Goes is suspiciously short, at 94
minutes, which suggests the sort of eleventh-hour tampering that might explain
some sub-plots that pop up and then just sorta vanish. But that doesn’t excuse
a few of Andrus’ hammer-handed narrative hiccups, most particularly a sidebar
so glaringly unpleasant that it feels yanked in from some other movie: a true
what-the-heck-were-they-thinking
moment.
Our central character is Oren
Little (Douglas), an irascible crank who nonetheless is the most successful
Realtor in a bucolic Connecticut lakefront community: the sort of place where
the rich have more money than God. Oren probably belongs in their company, but —
following his wife’s recent death, from cancer — he has chosen to reside in a
cramped multi-apartment unit dubbed Little Shangri-La. He shares this building
with adjacent first-floor neighbor Leah (Keaton) and two upstairs tenants.
All of whom regard him as a
grouch and a pain in the keister, an image Oren does nothing to discourage.
Once upon a time, Oren might have
been a nice guy, but spending two years watching his wife die drained all of
his finer qualities. Now he’s just one big commission away from being able to
retire, and he can’t wait to leave. Which seems odd on the surface, because
he’d also be abandoning his wife’s grave site, which he visits frequently.
We get no time to ponder that
detail, though, because Oren gets bushwhacked by his long-estranged son — Scott
Shepherd, as Luke — a former drug addict who, though sober, is going to prison
for reasons that frankly defy description (despite Andrus’ game effort to make
the situation sound credible). This forces Luke to leave his adorable 9-year-old
daughter, Sarah (Sterling Jerins), in the care of her only other relative: Oren
... who didn’t even know of the little girl’s existence.
A responsibility Oren initially
refuses flat-out. Fortunately, Leah is kind enough, and reasonable enough, to
step in and take charge of Sarah.
I’ve gotta say, that’s one impressive neighbor.
This unlikely arrangement aside,
Leah has been struggling to build a career as a lounge singer: a major step in
the wake of her own beloved husband’s death not long ago. Trouble is, Leah
dissolves into tears every time she attempts a torch song, which is something
of a liability under circumstances that pretty much demand an abundance of
torch songs.
That’s actually a captivating
character detail, and one of the few indications of the Mark Andrus scripts I
used to admire. Keaton does her own singing, and she’s pretty good, with a
delivery that’s just right for the material and this story’s setting. How she
eventually confronts her “weepiness issue” is far more engaging — and credible
— than anything else taking place in this narrative.
The rest of the script is
unconvincingly fast-tracked. Young Sarah accepts her new surroundings awfully fast, even for this sort of
story; the adorable Jerins barely has time to work her doleful features before boom, she settles into this new and
highly unusual routine as if born to it.
Oren thaws just as rapidly, and
unpersuasively ... particularly since he spends the first act being such a
thoroughly contemptible cad. That’s another serious problem: Douglas is much
too good at being unpleasant, and Oren’s lesser qualities — misogyny, racism,
brittle hostility and overall misanthropy — are worked to the point where
redemption, no matter how “necessary” in terms of the script, becomes hard to accept.
I’ll say this, though: The older
Douglas gets, the more he looks and sounds like his father. At times, you can
close your eyes and picture Kirk Douglas delivering this dialogue, and doing a
better job of being a crusty — but somehow lovable — old coot.
Michael Douglas, on the other
hand, never quite sells Oren’s eventual return to grace; it happens only
because the script insists as much. That’s also the case with Oren’s clumsy
effort to get Leah into bed, a wholly ridiculous scene that also “succeeds”
only because the script says so. Earlier this year, I complained about Olivia
Williams’ thoroughly ludicrous surrender to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ridiculous
advances, in Sabotage; well, Douglas’
romantic encounter with Keaton here is just as unbelievable.
Anyway...
The truly unforgivable sequence
comes when Oren decides, after too little research, to re-unite Sarah with her
deadbeat mother (Meryl Williams). This encounter is so grim and unpleasant that
the film screeches to a halt, with us viewers utterly aghast. The fact that
this becomes a tipping point for Oren himself is no justification; Jerins sells
the scene so well, Sarah’s face a blend of terror and resignation, that the
scene qualifies as child abuse.
On top of which, we’re
subsequently left with another sloppy detail: Sarah’s mother, having now been
introduced, seems primed for a third-act custody battle ... and yet we never
see her again. Which is ludicrous.
As for the rest...
Maurice Jones and Yaya DaCosta
are pleasant as a couple living in one of Little Shangri-La’s upstairs units;
he’s a local cop — whose profession proves handy, at one point — and she’s very
pregnant. Single mom Sarabeth (Markley Rizzi) lives in the other upstairs unit,
with her two lively young sons. At least, I think
she’s single; she speaks for herself, when abruptly insisting that she wants to
move ... and yet she seems to have a steady male companion.
That “wanting to move” detail is
something else that just gets discarded along the way.
Sternhagen has great fun as one
of Oren’s feisty realty colleagues; she’s always a hoot, and her tart delivery
is a great match for her equally piquant dialogue.
And, in a eyebrow-lifting bit of
cinematic serendipity, none other than Frankie Valli pops up as the owner of a
local restaurant where Leah hopes to get a job. Valli gets to gently spoof his
own younger self’s image, as presented in Jersey Boys, when he warns Oren not to “bust his balls.”
That line draws a genuine
chuckle, and is much more successful than several of Oren’s earlier references
to male anatomy, which are merely vulgar. And out of place in this script.
Reiner casts himself as Leah’s
friend and faithful pianist, yet another oddly underdeveloped role that
climaxes with a moronic pratfall.
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