I think most of us are the same on this. We tend to judge an actor’s performance on the level of emotional punches they throw at the camera, with expressive, hyper dynamic roles ones we most often remember as bam bang pow! Give that guy an award. Think of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, Leonardo DiCaprio in, well just about anything, Denzel Washington in Training Day, Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, and so many more. Sure, there are more subtle performances that have found their way to success, including Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune but I want to revisit a role that perhaps got lost in the shadow of his co-star and focus on what truly is a work of almost unimaginable skill in creating one of the most nuanced characters in cinema.
The movie is director Lawrence Kasdan‘s 1988 drama The Accidental Tourist, based on the book of the same name by novelist Anne Tyler. It’s an odd film stocked with eccentric people mixed up in an unusual romance orbiting around a devastating tragedy. It stars Geena Davis as a woman named Muriel Pritchet, an employee at an animal hospital who specializes in training dogs. She meets Macon Leary (William Hurt), a reclusive writer of travel guides for people who want to avoid the typical hardships of getting from on place to another.
Macon is a man in turmoil. His wife Sarah (Kathleen Turner) has left him after the two are unable to make their marriage work in the aftermath of the shooting death of their twelve-year-old son. Macon is not an easy man to confide in, and her loss, along with their son’s, pushes him further in the shadows of his mind. Forced to travel, and when his dog needs kenneling, he takes it to Muriel’s, where she offers to train him (the dog … but yeah, Macon as well). Macon is initially uninterested in any social contact, but Muriel is a persistent woman, and more so, uniquely aware of Macon’s needs, even if he’s doesn’t know it.
What follows is a small, quiet, and conversation heavy story involving Muriel’s slow burn approach to easing Macon into her life, one she shares with her seven-year-old son Alex (Robert Hy Gorman), a kid allergic to just about everything. Macon has broken his leg in an accident with the dog and so moves into the house he grew up in, where his sister Rose (Amy Wright) takes care of her older brothers Porter (David Ogden Stiers) and Charles (Ed Begley Jr.), grown men who have never really gotten the hang of independence. These are curious people with isolated views of the world. And because so, offer some amusing moments.
Either way, the film won Davis an Academy Award for her energetic and often humorous take on a woman who has not found what some might say a successful life but nonetheless is almost infectiously upbeat in her care of those around her. Muriel understands Macon’s internal disintegration and is drawn to his somewhat distant apathy to everything in a kind of nurturing manner. There’s this incredibly powerful moment when Macon comes to her apartment to deliver a single sentence letter of rejection and in her warming presence is instead led into her home with a knowing hand on his arm. He then melts before her in a shuttering confession of truth. This is what movies are all about.
It’s easy to see why Davis earned such high praise as Muriel as she is really the only character with what we might consider any range, at least with a superficial glance, but it is Hurt who deserves equal, if not more attention. He is not given any grand opportunities to let loose as it were, to breakdown into weeping sorrow or bouts of slathered fury. Instead, Macon is a man of concealment, crushed by his already cumbersome personality that thrives on order and the comforts of habit (beware the extra pickle on a French Burger King hamburger). This leaves Hurt with only the most minor of facial movements and gentle shifts in posture to convey to us the frustration of being Macon. That is manifested in the film as a growing almost acute pain in his lower back that defines the last act of the film.
While watching The Accident Tourist, you might at first feel nothing for Macon, and in fact wonder why Hurt is not “acting” like you’d expect. Indeed, Macon doesn’t have much of a filter when he does talk, and tends to not want anyone to question him, which leaves him somewhat cold. This is a man who makes a living telling others how to be the most rote and pragmatic person they can be, with advice (tricks) on how to be avoided so others won’t talk to you. This, you soon realize, is what Macon is as a person, and you quickly come to see what Hurt is doing, his performance weighted by this need to keep Macon invisible along with his inability to emotionally accept his son’s death. I’m wondering if in today’s world he’d be diagnosed with something tagged along the Autism spectrum.
No matter that, Hurt’s timing is razor sharp. Watch how he drops his head or lowers his eyebrows as people talk to him, the struggle he pours into Macon in trying to be present in the company of people he’d rather be far from. It makes the efforts of Muriel all the more rewarding when you see what affect she has on him when he allows for some escape. That it has consequences when he is faced with the return of “normality” only makes this film all the more impactful. This is a man who gets you to hate most of his decisions while keeping you inextricably entangled in sympathies for him. What a performance.
The Accidental Tourist is an uncommon film, lacking many of the typical story beats you will be expecting, including the lack of a final confrontation you are so certain is going to happen you can practically taste it. This is not a movie about that though, the standard formula of boy meets girl meets other girl and so on well removed from the cinematic hotplate of generic love stories. Rather, this is something far more compelling, a character study to some degree that is funny, heartbreaking, and most of all, wholly and entirely honest. Recommended.