Coast to Coast

After Madie drives the truck through the house at the end, the tractor is pointed 45 degrees down from the front, but from the side it's straight.

This is a funny movie with some smart dialog and a couple adults in adult situations for a change. Thoroughly enjoyable.

As I was watching this movie, I found myself struck by what seemed to be a number of similarities with the movie "Ordinary People." Like the story in that movie, Richard Dreyfuss and Judy Davis play a couple whose marriage is falling apart as they deal with the accidental death of their son a number of years before.

It was inspired casting in the pairing of Richard Dreyfuss and Judy Davis as Barnaby and Maxine Pierce, a middle-aged married couple on a trek by car from the East to the West coasts. The ostensible purpose of their auto trip is to attend their son's wedding in Los Angeles.

"Coast to Coast" sticks Dreyfuss and Davis front and center as a middle-aged couple on the verge of divorce who take a road trip from East to West coasts to attend their son's marriage while waxing nostalgic, visiting quirky friends, and sorting through old regrets along the way. Supposedly a poignant dramedy about reconciliation, this lame dose of couch potato fodder from Showtime has Toronto standing in for the US and a big hole where the entertainment should be.

My wife and I discovered this movie (accidentally) when TiVo recorded it for us. We noticed the great cast so decided to give it a try.

This is certainly an enjoyable movie with some very sharp witty remarks scattered throughout the dialogue.The main criticisms I have are:1.

I never caught the beginning of this movie, but obviously Madie Levrington (Dyan Cannon) escapes from a New York state mental hospital where her husband Benjamin had her committed to avoid the trial of an expensive divorce. Madie hitches a ride back to California with Charles Callahan (Robert Blake), a debt-ridden trucker.

Flighty, but willful and endearing wealthy screwball Madie (a winsomely daffy and bubbly Dyan Cannon) escapes from an asylum she was put in by her cheapskate jerk of a psychiatrist husband. Madie hitches a ride with grumpy, rough-around-the-edges cowboy trucker Charlie Callahan (nicely essayed with scruffy, rugged grace by Robert Blake), a profane, surly, seriously down on his luck grouch who just recently got divorced and is up to his eyeballs in debt.

Two splendid actors - Davis and Dreyfuss - doing nothing splendid or special with a predictable, trendiness-laden, and artificial Portentous-Moments-of-Life-Changing-Profundity script. I kept waiting for something to develop or to appear that wasn't bathetic, but no such luck.