February 10, 1989 | Cousins is a warm, wise and altogether wonderful romantic comedy, the sort of movie you should see with someone you love, and with whom you want to make love. Call it an early Valentine’s Day present for moviegoers, and you won’t be far off the mark.
The witty, richly textured script by playwright Stephen Metcalfe is based on Cousin, Cousine (1975), a delightful French comedy by Jean-Charles Tacchella. Very little has been lost, and a surprising amount has been gained, in the Americanized translation, which Joel Schumacher (The Lost Boys) has directed with great affection and perception. Indeed, Cousins is so intoxicatingly charming, so full of the magic of everyday life and fortuitous happenstance, that, even if you’ve already seen the original French production, it still will seem fresh and exhilarating.
And if you haven’t seen the original French production — well, good. You can view Cousins with an open mind, and no preconceptions whatsoever.
Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini, two actors with extremely uneven track records in movies, have their breakthrough roles here, perfectly cast as mismatched romantic leads. Danson is Larry Kozinski, an affable free spirit who changes jobs every two or three years — currently, he’s a ballroom dance instructor — to avoid the possibility of success. (“He’s a failure at everything,” notes a fond relative, “except life.”) Rossellini is Maria Hardy, a demure legal secretary with a long-untapped streak of breezy impetuosity.
Larry and Maria would make a perfect couple, if only they weren’t married to other people. Fortunately — since, after all, Cousins is based on a French comedy — they manage to overcome this impediment.
Fate and extended families bring them together. Larry, along with most other members of his Polish-American clan, is on hand for the wedding of his uncle to Edie Costello (Norma Aleandro), a vibrant Italian-American widow who just happens to be Maria’s mother. During the wedding reception, Tom (William Petersen), Maria’s car-salesman husband, and Tish (Sean Young), Larry’s ambitious wife, have a very brief, but highly conspicuous, dalliance. The adultery doesn’t mean very much — evidently, Tom doesn’t take his marriage vows very seriously, and Tish doesn’t take Tom very seriously. But it does bring Larry and Maria together for a conversation, to commiserate. And that, of course, leads to other things.
But those other things are delayed — mischievously, tantalizingly — as Larry and Maria wonder whether adultery might spoil their very special friendship. Ironically, that friendship is just what bothers Tom. “I’m not worried about their having sex,” Tom tells Tish. “I’m worried about their having a relationship.”
Meanwhile, life moves on: There is another wedding, a death, a funeral, and yet another wedding, all good excuses to reunite Maria’s and Larry’s families. Schumacher handles these ceremonies with a sharp eye for revealing details, a bemused affection for foolishness, and a vigorous appreciation for the ways comedy, tragedy and polite boredom can rub shoulders, and occasionally collide.
During one family gathering, Schumacher hops back and forth among a merry dance of children and adults, an angry fistfight between feuding relatives, and a sudden, fatal heart attack. Without ever appearing obvious, Schumacher gracefully connects the scenes and choreographs the camera movement, to unite all the activities as co-equal parts of a real world. At one point, it ceases to be a scene, and simply happens.
When it comes to unabashedly romantic interludes, Schumacher is every bit as deft. Of particular note is a scene where Maria and Larry, standing at either side of the tracks at a suburban train station, recognize each other, then try get close to each other. The sequence is densely packed with conflicting emotions, and crackles with life.
Danson and Rossellini are marvelous, both in their guilty hesitations and their reckless abandon, making theirs the most wholesome illicit affair in recent movie memory. Better still, when they finally become lovers, they treat the audience to a discreet but invigorating dose of happy, healthy sensuality. It’s much sexier, and funnier, than all the affected eroticism in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
William Petersen, the brooding avenger of Manhunter and To Live and Die in L.A., is an odd choice to play a cuckolded husband in a comedy. But the offbeat casting works: Petersen brings a nice touch of gravity to the stock role, even as he plays Tom at his most ludicrously self-absorbed. As Tish, a cosmetics consultant at a posh department store, Sean Young attractively rounds out the romantic quadrangle with high spirits just this side of madcap, and a determination just short of steely.
As Vince, Larry’s cantankerous father, Lloyd Bridges has his best role in years, maybe decades, and he plays it to the hilt. Larry shows up when his brother conveniently dies, and sticks around to woo Edie, his newly widowed ex-sister-in-law. But he keeps his distance at the funeral: “At my age,” he explains, “you don’t want to get too close to an open grave.” Norma Aleandro (The Official Story) is grand as Edie, especially in her scenes with Bridges, and Keith Coogan is amusingly impudent as Mitch, Larry’s teen-age son by an earlier marriage.
Cousins, supposedly set in some unnamed American city, was filmed on location in Vancouver, British Columbia, which cinematographer Ralf Bode turns into the most congenial place in the world for love to bloom. This movie may do more for the Canadian city than years of tourist bureau puffery.
