It's been over fifteen years since director Lawrence Kasdan hit pay dirt with the film he is best known for, The Big Chill, and over ten years have gone by since his second biggest hit, The Accidental Tourist. Since that time Kasdan has made several other films (such as French Kiss, I Love You to Death, and Grand Canyon) that have tried to live up to the excellent standard he laid out in his earlier work. But none of them ever quite got to that point. And Mumford is no exception.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that this formulaic ensemble piece, about a man who pretends to be a psychologist and thus gains the confidence of a small town's populace, falls very short of the mark. This movie tries to pass itself off in its trailers as being cerebral, and there are some truly witty spots of dialogue. However, so much of the rest of the film is typical Hollywood schlock, full of standard plot elements, choppy dialogue, and character types, that a few hours after you have left the theater, you will have forgotten those few funny moments.
The beginning of the film is a completely disjointed mess. It opens with the lead character, Doc Mumford (played by Loren Dean), running back and forth throughout the small town, also conveniently named Mumford. He goes from his office to Lily's, the small diner he frequents for lunch each day, to his apartment in the attic of Lily's house. This section of the movie is way too abrupt in introducing all of the characters and ends up being little more than a checklist of weirdos whose names we'll need to know for future reference.
We meet Pruitt Taylor Vince, who plays Harry, a pharmacist with lurid sexual fantasies. But as soon as he starts to get interesting, we get cut off. Doc decides to end Harry's session early becuase he's tired of hearing him ramble. We meet Lily, played by Alfre Woodard, in an extremely short and poorly written scene. She serves Mumford lunch and introduces him to the town's billionaire misfit, Skip (played by Jason Lee), who literally skates by and then is gone. We meet Nessa, a depressed teenager with a poor self-image. Poof, she's gone. Mary McDonnell's character Althea appears and then vanishes. Martin Short does a cameo. And as I sat there in the less-than-crowded theater, watching this parade of eccentricity, a man in the row in front of me left because he could only take so much. Seconds later my friend leaned over to me and whispered, "Have we established a point yet?"
By the time Kasdan does get around to establishing the point, too much damage has been done to salvage things, and it's nothing new to us anyway. Redemption, for most of the characters in the film, is easy once they find that special someone, and it is all too convenient how the characters end up pairing off. For Harry, finding a real-life partner to base his sexual fantasies on is a plausible route to recovery. But for Althea, her "startling epiphany" comes out of nowhere and is not very likely to happen in real therapy. The same is true of how Nessa starts believing in herself when she finds a decent boyfriend, Althea's son. I just didn't buy it.
At times the acting is brilliant. Jason Lee is adequately strange as Skip and proves that he can play characters that have evolved past the level of the characters he plays in Kevin Smith's movies. Alfre Woodard is equally charming as Lily. Too bad that both of these characters, Mumford's best friends, somehow manage to disappear about halfway through the film.
And then we come down to the two main characters, Doc Mumford himself and his love interest, Sofia Crisp, masterfully played by Hope Davis. Sofia is recently divorced and has come home from her great job in the big city because she hasn't the energy to carry on. Mumford falls for her instantly and agrees to meet with her on whatever terms are necessary, including house calls. The good doctor quickly realizes she has clinical depression, a diagnosis we get to witness in a scene in which Doc and Sofia discuss her symptoms, which in a truly innovative piece of film-making (read closely and you can actually hear the sarcasm) is intercut with a scene of him looking up these symptoms on the Internet.
Both Loren Dean and Hope Davis are wonderful actors who do extremely well with parts that require a more subtle sort of chemistry than usually displayed between leads in romantic comedies. Hope Davis is absolutely brilliant, as is Loren Dean for the most part. Both are able to suppress the majority of their emotions and only let the slightest hints of their true feelings out for the audience to observe.
But... well... do you remember that story about Saving Private Ryan? About how there was this really great speech that Tom Hanks was supposed to give and how it would have revealed a lot about his character? And how Hanks decided to cut it out because he thought it wasn't fitting for such a reserved character to spill his guts so blatantly?
Well, I wish Loren Dean had done the same in this film. About midway through the movie, this quiet, reserved man suddenly spills his guts to Skip about his real life. For about ten minutes he does narration over flashbacks filmed in grainy film stock and filled with gratuitous nudity and drug use. Normally nudity doesn't bug me, but here it was so pointless that I just have to mention it. Kasdan avoids showing us the truly lurid parts of Harry's sex fantasies, letting our imagination do the work for him, but with Mumford he just spills it all. In this scene Loren Dean totally jumps out of character, but it is not something I can really fault him for. It is more the fault of the script, which in this scene spells out for the audience much more than is necessary, rather than letting us piece it together for ourselves and having it come to a surprise when all is revealed in the end.
In other scenes the characterization is just plain flat. Some people (such as in the cases of Sofia's brother and Althea's daughter) serve only to deliver lines that could easily have been given to other characters. And at other times, certain characters are mere plot devices. Ted Danson, playing Althea's husband, is there only to leave her, and Martin Short is only around to get annoyed in the beginning and set the town's other psychologists on the road toward finding out the truth about Doc Mumford. (If anyone can explain to me how he manages to end up on Mumford's side in the end, please feel free to do so.)
I could go on about those other psychologists and Sofia's parents, how undeveloped they were and what an opportunity Kasdan wasted by letting them slip away from him. And I could continue on about the sub-par dialogue in certain scenes, like the one in which Skip and Doc bond for the first time-- the "three big ones" scene, as I like to call it-- but I'm through wasting your time with this movie. Put simply, this movie does not deserve your money. Go to the video store and rent any other Lawrence Kasdan film, even the ones that I listed above as only being average. I guarantee that they will all leave you feeling more satisfied in the end than this film ever would.
