“Shaggy Dog Story”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

Darling Companion is a pleasant little movie about a simple little subject from the beginning to the end.

Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, this movie can be added to his other movies, such as the 1981 Body Heat, the 1983 The Big Chill, and the 1991 Grand Canyon, among many others.

It stars Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest, Richard Jenkins, and Sam Shephard, and it is about a lovable dog that goes missing and all the problems that causes.

When the movie opens, Beth and her daughter Grace are returning home from the airport when Beth orders Grace to stop the car on the freeway, because she saw something on the side of the road.

What Beth saw was a dog, and to make a long story short, after a veterinarian says there is nothing wrong with him that a few good meals and a bath won’t fix, Beth decides to keep the dog and names him Freeway.

Beth tells her reluctant husband, Joseph, “He’s not mine. I’m just going to find him a home.”

Well, you can guess how that works out, can’t you?

Sure enough, a year later, everybody is at the vacation home in the mountains of Beth and Joseph, where Grace is getting married, and Freeway is still a part of the family.

So, Joseph is out in the woods taking Freeway for a walk when Freeway spots a deer and runs off after it.

Freeway doesn’t come back, Beth blames Joseph for losing the dog while Joseph was talking on his phone, and this disrupts everybody’s plans for going back to their homes after the wedding, because now they all decide to stay until Freeway can be found.

Everybody includes Beth and Joseph, Joseph’s sister Penny, Penny’s grown son Bryan and her new boyfriend Russell, a young woman who “sees things,” because her mother was a gypsy and her father was a yogi, and even the local sheriff.

Well, now the story isn’t so much a story about a missing dog, but a story about the relationships of three sets of couples, some good and some not so good.

Darling Companion is like a shaggy dog story, which means that you either enjoyed all the details as it gets to the end or else the end itself was just as enjoyable.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”