This gentle film about the attainment of unobtrusive stability has a style that almost expresses its theme too well - it's so polite and pleasant as to almost melt away before your very eyes. Dean plays a psychologist called Mumford, practicing in the small town of Mumford (neatly summarizing the theme of assimilation), who achieves success and local popularity more through sympathetic listening and empathy than clinical technique - no surprise then, that he's not a psychologist at all, but just a man trying to escape the mistakes of his past. Dean's undemonstrative performance is oddly suited to a movie that's clearly conservative, if not regressive, in its distrust of pace, ambition and big business (Ted Danson has a wonderful cameo as the embodiment of all these evils, and the movie's flashbacks to Dean's old life fleetingly adopt the style of something like Se7en). In many ways the film seems merely trite and naive, hardly funny at all even though it's being sold as a comedy, and yet it's certainly coherent and assured - it's as if Kasdan had been making the same basic movie for years and has thus attained a comfortable, almost effortless autopilot: a strange effect given that this hasn't in fact been Kasdan's career.
