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Mumford Review by
David Luty
The
four-year sabbatical has been good to Lawrence Kasdan who, after a period of
apparent artistic deflation with the creation of the disastrously bloated Wyatt
Earp and the spiritlessly formulaic romantic comedy French Kiss, has
somewhat regained his footing. He’s back with the sort of strong character
work at which he’s always excelled, breezy stuff with emotional undertows of
varying strengths like The Big Chill, Grand Canyon, and The
Accidental Tourist. Mumford is significantly lighter than all three,
but it carries its own particular weight in the romantic longing it (sometimes)
so deftly conveys. The film utilizes a skill Kasdan has always been masterful
with, drawing up quirky characters who behave in believably human ways. It’s
rare to find quirked-up characters who also aren’t precocious and
over-mannered, and it requires a certain breezy finesse that seemed to have
abandoned Kasdan in his last couple of works. With
that in mind, Loren Dean is just what the doctor ordered. Dean’s presence has
popped up mostly in the body of fringe characters (Say Anything, Apollo
13, Enemy of the State), but Kasdan isn’t the first director to use
him in the title role of a Hollywood film (that honor goes to Robert Benton and Billy
Bathgate, respectively). He’s just the first one to use him well. A
relatively unknown actor whose charisma is muted to say the least, Dean is a
stone-faced, emotionally concrete presence, and he treats Kasdan’s written
lines perfectly -- he throws them away. His staccato rhythms and flat
inflections are the perfect tonic for a character many more expressive actors
would have turned into ham. You see, Mumford is a single young man who practices
psychology with much success in the peacefully rural, tightly knit town of, yes,
Mumford, and he has a secret. He has a few of them, actually, but first and
foremost is the fact that he isn’t quite who he claims to be. In the movie’s
pat yet truthful conceit, Mumford has more patients than the other two town
therapists combined for a very simple reason -- he is good at listening to
people. But sometimes he doesn’t want to listen, and has no problem cutting a
session short when he happens to feel like it. Mumford is an odd bird, a loner
who keeps his personal feelings close to the vest and his professional ethics
loose. As played by Dean, he’s a figure of great fascination, in the way he
draws his audience, whether it be the one laying on his couch or the one in the
theater, closer to him by his supremely confident calm. Kasdan,
up to a point, shares that confidence, giving Mumford the film a crisp pace and
witty, amusing tone, and surrounding Mumford with a number of lively supporting
characters, most of whom are or turn out to be his patients. They are played by
uniformly accomplished talent, including Martin Short, Alfre Woodard, Mary
McDonnel, Pruitt Taylor Vince, David Paymer, Jane Adams, Ted Danson, and
newcomer Zooey Deschanel, as a delicate teen rebel with a predilection for
eating disorders and an addiction to fashion magazines. But Kasdan’s
confidence lags a bit when it comes to this quantity, and by the end of the film
he has too many character problems to resolve (and he glibly resolves the
problems of every character) and too little nuance to pull it off. He would have
been much better off focusing more attention on two of Mumford’s relationships
-- his budding friendship with young billionaire industrialist Skip Skiperton,
played with a wonderfully sweet innocence by the usually smart-assed Jason Lee,
and his budding romance with patient Sofie Crisp, played by Hope Davis with a
winning combination of toughness and vulnerability. Neither budding relationship
quite gets the opportunity they deserve to bloom, and that’s because Kasdan
almost forgets what gives Mumford, the movie, its likeably easygoing life.
It’s Mumford, stupid. Not the town and its Hollywood homespun inhabitants,
which is the type of small-town America that exists only in movies (and lots of
‘em), but Mumford, the character, the likes of whom has never taken center
stage in a Hollywood movie before. Contents | Features | Reviews
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