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Review:
 Whatever
happened to Paul Reiser? For many years he was the star of a
beloved TV sitcom, and then he kind of vanished off the face of
the Earth while his TV wife Helen Hunt managed to get an Oscar®
and all other sorts of awards.
I guess that this kind of answers the question. He's been sitting
on his laurels and pecking away at a fictionalized memoir of his
father. If you're of a certain ethnic persuasion, this is a film
for you!
Ben(Reiser) and Rachel Kleinman(Elizabeth Perkins) are a a
middle-aged middle class couple with a pair of cute daughters and
everything seems to be going along just swimmingly when suddenly,
out of nowhere, Ben's father Sam(Peter Falk) appears from out of
the blue. Why does he do this?. You may ask. Well, it seems that
Muriel(Olympia Dukakis), his wife of almost half a century, has up
and left him without so much as a…no, she leaves a short note,
still. Sam is devastated.
Ben and his sisters are far less so, but it's Ben and Rachel
who're stuck with him, and it's decided that our hero should take
Dad with him to upstate New York to look at a farmhouse Ben's
thinking of buying.
Thus begins a long and strange bonding experience between the two
men, actually doing all that stuff they should have done during
Ben's childhood but somehow didn't. They fish, purchase a very old
classic car (after cracking the old one up), go camping, take in a
minor league baseball game, and all the while arguing about the
things that went wrong in their lives, both real and imagined.
Between the bickering and the making up, we've got a heterosexual
male love story.
Peter Falk gives the performance of his life here. He's both
endearing and irritating, in other words delightful. So's Reiser,
who's almost exactly how he was back in the day. It's very funny
in places, but might be a little ethnocentric for some people.
It's worth a look.
Eric Lurio
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