Word: kasdan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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GRAND CANYON. The season's Nice Try Award goes to Lawrence Kasdan. As director and co-writer of this rambling comedy-drama, he tackles big issues (race relations, infidelity, mid-life malaise, crime) with some soaring ingenuity and the help of an attractive cast (Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Mary-Louise Parker). Grand Canyon goes all weird and wussy at the end, but for the first hour or so it addresses real issues and feelings -- the preoccupations of most people who work outside Hollywood...
...Mack, in fact, turns into a benign busybody, trying to pat almost all the lives that touch his into shape. His work comes out a little too neatly, but Kline's performance, like all the others, is engagingly soft- spoken. And well spoken. The screenplay -- by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan -- has a nice, unforced wit, and Lawrence Kasdan's direction has its jagged edges. If sometimes this loose and anecdotal film loses dramatic pace, it always rights itself. And it remains steadily in touch with its best qualities -- generosity, common sense and a mature decency that is neither smug...
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan...
...proves strangely indestructible. This sort of homicidal fable demands the stiletto of satire -- the very weapon flourished by Italian director Pietro Germi in his brilliant '60s comedies Divorce Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned. But what played in Sicily for Germi doesn't work in Tacoma, Wash., for Lawrence Kasdan. This crime does not spring from the polluted mores of a medieval society; it is the private whim of an exasperated woman. I Love You to Death lacks the precision, ferocity and guts needed for black farce. It has the American failing: it just wants to be loved...
...exuberance and meekly disappears into the black hole of her role. Joan Plowright, a grande dame of English theater, plays a Yugoslav granny, and loses. William Hurt, as a dim doper hired to kill Joey, works beyond his range and beneath his gifts. The same may be said of Kasdan. The director of Body Heat and The Big Chill now wastes his time on the movie equivalent of a summer-stock trifle. Joey could tell him that sins of this magnitude ought to be confessed in private, not released to 1,075 theaters...