You can tell a lot from a movie by its opening shot. Rob Reiner’s new film, And So It Goes, opens with a crane shot delicately gliding over a landscape of absolute tranquility. We’re in a verdant seaside town in Connecticut, where the skies are always clear, there’s never any traffic, and the residences and businesses are storybook-quaint.
These images — which scream “promotional tourism video” more than “narrative feature” — coupled with the benign tinkle of Marc Shaiman’s piano score, indicate everything we need to know about the movie’s texture. If the opening crane shots of The Shining suggested implacable dread, this movie’s overture tells us to take it easy; you’re in for an unthreatening and wholly predictable 90 minutes.
And So It Goes is a broad vehicle for its stars, Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton, who are granted the ease of re-visiting past filmic personae, never pushing themselves beyond their comfort zones. He gets away with the sort of blunt, acerbic charm that only a Douglas could pull off, and she essentially inhabits the skin of Annie Hall again, still dotty and mercurial and self-conscious after all these years.
Douglas plays Oren Little, a widowed, misanthropic “get off my lawn” real estate agent who drives a pale-blue hunk of metal as big as a Buick (come to think of it, it probably is a Buick) and who enjoys peppering stray dogs with a paintball gun in his spare time. He’s trying to sell his own $8 million home, and in the meantime he’s holed up in a cutesy townhouse he’s dubbed “Little Shangri-La,” sharing space with neighbors who tolerate his crotchety lifestyle.
One of them, Leah (Keaton), is also conveniently widowed and trying to succeed as a lounge singer in a sleepy restaurant; her voice is fine, but she can’t get through a standard without sobbing. Opposites in most ways, these two are obviously going to connect; you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that they’re going to change each other in positive ways.
And So It Goes does enjoy some distinction in its inciting incident, though. Oren’s estranged son Kyle (Austin Lysy), a recovering heroin addict, re-emerges in Oren’s life after a 10-year-absence, and he drops a couple of bombshells: He’s going to prison for at least six months, and he has a 9-year-old daughter he needs Oren to handle while he’s away. Oren does everything he can to foist the adorable little girl on anyone but himself — including the childless Leah, who takes a shining to motherhood just as Oren takes a shining to her.
To be fair, while this film is up-front about its rom-com formula, it eschews the sophomoric clichés of senior-citizen movie hookups and their attendant sexual dysfunction jokes and ageist visual gags. For all the relevance and edge Reiner has lost since his ’80s heyday, he at least has the decency to spare us these. But as the movie’s weak palette of yuks reveals, he still thinks that a guy in an unflattering toupee tumbling over a children’s slip-and-slide (played by Reiner himself, as Leah’s accompanist) is the soul of comedy, along with the image of a dog humping a sizable teddy bear, not to mention that other lowbrow chestnut: an elderly person cursing and chain-smoking.
And So It Goes will please audiences that don’t want any challenges or surprises in their cinema — and, to be honest, that’s a large chunk of moviegoers — but I can’t give it a pass simply for being consumer-friendly, especially not with Reiner’s once-stellar track record. If anything clues us in on the filmmaker’s creative dearth, it’s the movie’s title. It’s the romantic-comedy equivalent of these disposable Steven Seagal titles (On Deadly Ground, Maximum Conviction, Force of Execution), so bland and hollow that it says nothing and is designed to be forgotten. Boy meets girl, they hate each other, soon they love each other, and so it goes.
AND SO IT GOES. Director: Rob Reiner; Cast: Michael Douglas, Diane Keaton, Sterling Jerins, Rob Reiner, Yaya DaCosta, Frankie Valli; Distributor: Castle Rock; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday at most area cinemas