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Darling Companion

DARLING COMPANION (Lawrence Kasdan). 103 minutes. Opens Friday (April 27). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: N


The good news is that Lawrence Kasdan has escaped the cesspool of batshit craziness that constituted his demented adaptation of Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher nearly a decade ago. The bad news is that he’s escaped it by making a different sort of terrible movie.

In Darling Companion, the search for a lost dog sends an empty-nester (Diane Keaton), her distracted husband (Kevin Kline), his affable nephew (Mark Duplass), the nephew’s flighty mother (Dianne Wiest) and her doofus boyfriend (Richard Jenkins) racing all over a small Colorado town. And wouldn’t you know it, they end up learning valuable lessons about themselves and each other along the way.

Like Kasdan’s The Big Chill and Grand Canyon – both of which also featured Kline as a sardonic truth-teller – Darling Companion is ultimately about well-off people whose problems turn out to be the catalyst for self-discovery and happiness.

But where those earlier films were genuinely concerned with searching their characters’ souls, this one sets up a bunch of empty scenes where people are trapped with each other and pass the time by arguing and reconciling.

It also feels ridiculously out of touch, as in the scene where Keaton and Kline find themselves lost in the Rockies. Apparently, neither Kasdan nor his co-writer/wife, Meg, is aware of the GPS function on their iPhone.

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