It forces Macon to board Edward at a kennel while he travels introduces Macon to the kennel’s magnificent ditz, Muriel Pritchett (Geena Davis) inadvertently brings Macon back to the bosom of his extremely strange family (blame Edward for that, too, in the film’s most explosively hilarious moment), and changes the course of everyone’s life forever. So as we meet her, she is moving out, to another part of Baltimore, traumatizing Macon even more-if such a thing were possible. (As though the killing of a 12-year-old could make sense in any context.)ĭuring that succeeding year, Macon, never in the thick of life anyway, has retreated even further, and Sarah has needed comfort and not found it. His wife, Sarah (Kathleen Turner), calls that quality “muffled.” It is, heaven knows, a Leary family trait but it has been intensified by the shocking death a year ago of Macon and Sarah’s son, Ethan, shot in what television reporters delight in calling a senseless murder.

He’s not old, not young, and as we meet him, not happy but holding. For them he will report on what Tokyo restaurants serve Sweet ‘n Low or whether any restaurant in Rome offers the reassurance of Chef Boyardee ravioli. Its central figure is Macon Leary (Hurt), a writer whose specialty is compiling the travel books of the title, for Americans with a horror of travel.

A lot of “The Accidental Tourist” is pretty astonishing. The laughs may not come in whoops-except for Edward and the cellar stairs-they unfold in recognition and in unbelieving astonishment.

That’s a difficult quality to reconcile yourself to in a film whose partial subject is death and mourning yet a wry and special humor permeates everything here.

The accidental tourist book review