You’re a dead ringer.”īefore it’s over he has not only sweet talked his way out of a traffic ticket, but he gets the city’s finest to provide a running jump start for his temperamental roadster. “I don’t know why I didn’t make you right away. In one marvelous scene he talks his way into the good graces of a NYPD cop who has pulled him over for racing his red convertible through Soho: “Are you Tommy Callaghan’s kid?” he asks after reading the officer’s name tag.
Murray’s the one who gets one standout moment after the other. And she has a great third-act monologue in which she tells off her old man for his selfishness.īut of course Laura is the straight-man role. Her attitude toward Felix - equal parts loving admiration and clear-eyed suspicion - is precisely limned. Jones is terrific as a woman whose faith in her marriage is tested but never shattered.
TEMPERAMENTAL RODSTAR SERIES
Mostly, though, it provides a series of opportunities for superbly written and performed verbal exchanges. It’s a quest that will have them crashing swank Manhattan soirees and even a Mexican resort.
Or could it be that in maturity he’s desperate to connect with the child he once almost drove away? That he has an agenda beyond Dean’s presumed infidelity?īasically what we’ve got here is a comic mystery in which father-and-daughter sleuths go searching for proof of Dean’s fooling around. Could Dean be having a fling with one of his young helpers?įelix, after all, is a past master of marital deception he knows the signs of a cheating husband and doesn’t want his little girl blindsided in the same way as when he broke up with Laura’s mother decades earlier. Laura’s doubts about herself and her marriage go from lukewarm bath to slow-simmer when her father, famous art dealer and inveterate womanizer Felix (Murray), puts a bug in her ear. Approaching 40, with two young children to care for and a writing career that appears stalled, New Yorker Laura (Rashida Jones) is a envious of her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans), an entrepeurial type working on a big project that requires much travel, usually in the company of his team of young go-getters. Bill Murray and his gleefully smarmy insouciance have been part of our collective unconscious for so long - more than four decades now - that it’s easy to forget that he is one formidable actor.Īnd to prove that point one need look no further than Sofia Coppola’s “On the Rocks,” a father/daughter road trip that chugs along without a misstep, providing along the way many an opportunity for Murray to do his glorious thing.