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.
