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Welcome to Mooseport

Starring: Ray Romano, Christine Baranski, Gene Hackman, Marsha Gay Harden, Fred Savage, Maura Tierney
Director: Donald Petrie

Reviewed by P. Joshua Laskey

Welcome to Mooseport lived up to its title when its opening sequence set up a world in which neighborly greetings and quirkiness so usual as not to merit notice punctuated the insular serenity of "smalltown" existence. By this convention I was cinematically welcomed to Mooseport and helped to understand the nature and parameters of the world into which the moviemakers would take me. This first impression was ably sustained by the solid, if lightly written, chorus of archetypal townspeople who surround the principles and populate the fictional Mooseport. For these performers, though they inhabit seemingly individual onscreen personae, chorus is neither a pejorative nor an inaccurate term for their functional existence given that they served as commentary, elementally, and as gossips, literally (in the less offensive sense that a gossip is one concerned with the concerns of others).

This exclusive focus on the principles and events surrounding their conflict came at the expense of the individual chorus members' interests and whatever meaningful subplots might once have existed in the script to flesh out these characters or offer counterpoint to the main drama. Thus, any countercurrents in the story, often expressed through the trials of minor characters, had been bleached, discarded, or reduced to nonsequitur by final cut. I found this lightening of the dramatic load unfortunate as the hardworking characteractors tried to draw more than stereotypical cutouts from spare screentime and a script that employed the small town of popular imagination as a charming backdrop sacrificing its potential use as an affecting crucible. This theme, far from limiting itself to the setting and supporting cast, actually permeated the entire picture as those elements that stood out continued for the duration to go underexploited in the storytelling.

Instead of exercising a cast whose spectrum of popularity alone might draw a crowd to the cinema, the movie left me mourning potential unfulfilled. Rather than let these proven comic thoroughbreds run, the producers relegated them to a petting zoo where they did their best, chomping at the bit, to entice my laughter while garnering my sympathy. But even sympathetic to their characters, I watched as these tested comedians could not fill the gaps left in a script that appears to have been an interesting idea revised in committee and then hedged by a studio mistrustful of its hired artists.

The story tends to be a word comedy starved of wit and imagination while striving to be a situational comedy unsustained by either strong writing or clever insight. In its final form, the script is tackled by a cast unsupported by their lines and undermatched by the situations those lines create. In this vein, the most delightful scene, for me, was one shared by Tierney and Harden whose characters were, by virtue of being most sympathetic, also most interesting. Because the scene offered comment on other parts of the plot as well as finally giving these colorful actresses free reign to ply their crafts and vitalize the blackandwhite world of the page, it glimmered as a diamond in the rough - a good lie in the tall grass. Overall, I give Welcome to Mooseport two stars for its average use of convention to achieve usual ends.

Rating:

(2 out of 4 stars)