The star-studded flop Roger Ebert detested: “How could it be so appallingly pointless?”
A big-name cast is no guarantee of a quality movie, something Roger Ebert discovered to his detriment when the cavalcade of top-tier talents involved on either side of the camera lulled him into a false sense of security and left him devastated when the film in question turned out to be a cinematic dumpster fire.
While a stacked ensemble can often benefit a feature, few things are more infuriating than watching an esteemed roster of stars, veterans, and established character actors gathered together and failing to even bring a shred of their gifts to the table. It happens, though, and it left Ebert crushed.
To be fair, he can’t have been the only one expecting big things from the romantic dramedy, even if the potential for saccharine sentimentality was always off the charts. After all, it’s a film about a woman who rescues a stray dog which her husband subsequently loses, causing friction in their marriage before she spots her four-legged friend during a plane ride and decides to mount a rescue mission.
Yes, it sounds silly, but good actors and proven filmmakers can elevate even the most mediocre material. With that in mind, 2012’s Darling Companion, directed by Body Heat and The Big Chill‘s Lawrence Kasdan, looked as though it had enough in the tank to transform narrative chicken shit into big-screen chicken salad.
As for the cast? Academy Award winners Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline played the central couple, with support coming from Oscar-nominated playwright and actor Sam Shepard, Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins, Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe winner Elisabeth Moss, and Emmy-winning mumblecore pioneer Mark Duplass.
That’s a hell of a lineup, which was precisely why Ebert was so infuriated. “It’s depressing to reflect on the wealth of talent that conspired to make this inert and listless movie,” he wrote in his review. “How could it fail to be good? Lacking that, how could it fail to be fair? How could it be so appallingly pointless? How could it be such thin soup?”
They’re all fair questions and ones that Darling Companion wasn’t remotely interested in answering. Family-orientated dramas with dogs at the centre have always been one of the easiest ways for a movie to tug at the heartstrings, but Kasdan and his high-calibre colleagues instead decided to settle on something worse than being overbearingly terrible: an exercise in crushing mediocrity.
It would also be an understatement to say audiences shared the critic’s apathy when Darling Companion arrived in theatres to promptly vanish without a trace. Budgeted at a relatively thrifty $12 million, considering the big names attached, the dismal film earned less than $800,000 in ticket sales. Honestly, that’s about what it deserved for having the temerity to take so many talented performers and plunge them into such a forgettable flick.
