The Daytrippers (1996)'s comments

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Siskoid

If The Daytrippers is your first feature, how do you wind up then only making dumbass comedies like Superbad, Paul, and Keeping Up with the Joneses? Not to say these are all bad, but it seems like he got off the indie track pretty quickly. The Daytrippers has the underrated Hope Davis find a note that makes her suspect her husband's infidelity, so on her mother's recommendation/command, the whole family climbs into a station wagon, drives to the city, and investigates the possibility. Following clues, they meet a number of characters along the way, for no other reason than to expose or contrast their own family dynamics, and by the end, it will have been more about the mom than either of the two girls (the other played by Parker Posey), or at least about how they rebel against her meddling. What The Daytrippers shows us is a pivot, the moment where things can change, but not, strictly speaking, any real outcomes. Life isn't a story, it's ongoing, it's messy, it's unfinished. And this is definitely done on purpose, or else Greg Mottola would have allows Liev Schreiber's intellectual poser to finish synopsizing his novel. An often funny character-driven comedy, it comes across as part Mike Leigh and part Noah Baumbach, but in that clash of classes, speaks many truths.

3 years 9 months ago