Word: caan
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HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT Directed by James Caan Screenplay by Spencer Eastman...
...easy to think of James Caan as just another pretty face: a pleasant, inoffensive actor who is just right for light entertainments like Chapter Two. It is brave enough for him to play the leading role that of an inarticulate factory workerin Hide in Plain Sight, since it is the kind of small, sober film no agent would regard as a good career move." But this is also Caan's debut as a director. To choose this true story of a man trying to find and then recover his children, who have been abducted...
Neil Simon's screen adaptation of his Broadway success Chapter Two takes this touching phenomenon seriously. Simon's central characters, a newly widowed writer (James Caan) and a newly divorced actress (Marsha Mason), snap zingers at each other during a wary meeting, a breathless courtship and a marriage that almost fails before it gets started, conforming to the theatrical convention Simon has created for himself. But they have the good grace to be self-conscious about their verbal twitchiness. They understand there are more important matters at stake here. As a result, the movie is rather blurred...
...Caan's character particularly needs more time to digest the loss of his wife. His guilty anger and depression impose terrible requirements of patience on his new love after she has committed herself to the more cheerful persona he originally showed her. Simon, of course, is writing autobiographically here; Marsha Mason, now Mrs. Simon, is playing at least a version of herself in this film. This speaks well of everyone's bravery; Mason's speech accepting the notion that she is worthy of love and encouraging her new husband to embrace a similar self-acceptance is truly...
...short, there is an old-fashioned man beneath the smart patter of Simon's dialogue. Moore has given his work a flat, old-fashioned production. And although Mason and Caan are agreeable people, they (and Moore) seem not quite up to the large emotions the film's dark second half requires them to express. Everything is a little too gingerly. In the end, the film must be judged as muted, likable, not all it might have been, but a nice-and terribly decent-try. -Richard Schickel