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| Directed by Lawrence Kasdan; Starring Loren Dean, Hope Davis, Jason Lee, Alfre Woodard, David Paymer, Jane Adams, Mary McDonnell, Dana Ivey, Kevin Tighe, Zooey Deschanel, Ted Danson, Martin Short, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and Robert Stack |
Film director Lawrence Kasdan is one of the more beloved directors to most people, with the exception of maybe me. He is considered one of the greatest modern American directors, and I just do not see it. I’m out singing the praises of David Fincher, David Cronenberg, Todd Solondz and other more unusual directors, leaving people like Kasdan seeming very static and uninteresting. His films are just a walk through the park to me and I’m never really left with any feeling or interest in anything he tried to tell me. I have only twice given a Kasdan film a recommendation, in 1983 with the just okay The Big Chill and in 1988 with the overrated The Accidental Tourist. I thought that The Big Chill was a nice little story, but nothing to write home about and that The Accidental Tourist was light and billowy, but still not anything like Oscar material (much the same way I felt recently with James L. Brooks’ As Good As It Gets). One can say that Lawrence Kasdan and I have the exact same relationship as I have with Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola (though I would say that the prestige for those two are much higher than Kasdan’s). If you ask me, it is Kasdan’s son Jake that really deserves my time. Though having only done one film, Jake Kasdan has proven himself a better director than his dad with the terrific The Zero Effect from two years ago.
Despite all this, I’ll be first to admit when someone surprises me (remember my change of heart with Devon Sawa after S.L.C. Punk! and Idle Hands) and Kasdan has somewhat surprised me. His new film Mumford is the light and affectionate film that I’d usually find cloying but at least this time it has a darker and cynical side. The whole ideology of the film is not necessarily ‘love conquers all,’ but the moral seems to be ‘lie well and you’ll get what you want.’ Mumford is about a man named Mumford (Dean) that moves to a town named Mumford to start a psycho-analysis practice. The townspeople open up to him and he begins to have more patients than the two other psychologists (Adams and Paymer) combined. Everyone seems to like him and friends come quick to him, but there is one small problem: he is not really a psychologist. Everything from the name to the certificates on his walls are fake and he is making a nice wage doing an occupation he is good at, though not certified to do it. He starts two relationships with clients, one as a friend, one as a hopeful lover. The friend is a local skateboarder that has made a fortune as the manufacturer of modems named Skip Skipperton (Lee). When he confides in Mumford, he often finds Mumford simply telling him the secrets of his other patients, finally telling him the truth about his past. The hopeful lover is the closet-case Sofie (Davis) that lives with her parents and is only seeing him because her father is making her.
Mumford is a likable film, but less than great. I enjoyed the performers and I liked most of the scenarios, but the film does not always succeed. Considering that it is supposed to be a comedy, I was surprised at just how little I laughed. There were funny moments, but there were also moments where I just sat there scratching my head at what importance a scene was to the film and how off-kilter parts were (the stand-out scene of thus would be when Mumford recounts his past with drugs, the IRS, and monks). The normally literal Kasdan has some scenes that did stand out like the occasional dramatizations of a patient’s soft-core pornographic dreams. No matter how I felt about Mumford, I still think that Kasdan has little else up his sleeve for the future.
