Life in the country isn’t what Andy (chevy Chase) and Elizabeth Farmer (Madolyn Smith Osborne) thought it was going to be. They are moving out of New York and settling into a small town, Redbud, so that Andy can work on his first novel.
Unfortunately, life has other plans, and nothing goes right, from phone installation to furniture, to fishing competitions to a runaway dog to a body buried on the property to so much nature and oh so much more, the Farmers aren’t ready for the quiet life.
Directed by George Roy Hill, who has an iconic filmography (The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), the film features a script written by Jeffrey Boam (who was about to work on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) based on the book by Jay Cronley.
It’s not all laugh-out-loud humour, a lot of it is quiet chuckling as things seem to get progressively worse for the Farmers, and Andy struggles with his novel, and the town’s inhabitants. Not to mention that he’s got some issues when Elizabeth writes and sells a book all while he’s struggling to get by.
That is going to cause serious problems for he and Elizabeth when he hands off her new work to his publishers. And that’s not even the tip of the iceberg for problems. The town ends up completely breaking Farmer down until he goes to them and asks them to help them sell the house so they can go back to the city and lead separate lives.
To do so, they ask the town to make itself a Norman Rockwell fantasy, and that leads to some of the most delightful comedy in the film. And it may cost the Farmers a fortune, and is one more thing to absolutely break them.
Can things have a happy ending before the credits roll?
Chase is charming here, and it’s nice to see Andy struggling with everything that is going on without losing it completely like Clark Griswold would do. Chase has cited this as his favorite film that he’s done. It’s definitely a quieter film for him. It’s not entirely wacky, and everything is fairly straitlaced, with a lot of the humor grounded in reality. If slightly askew.
Osborne is absolutely adorable, and she makes a delightful pairing with Chase, she’s smart and sexy and can hold her own onscreen with him.
It’s a simple, soft chuckle movie, and not a laugh-out-loud one, and I think that was why it didn’t wow audiences as much as it was hoped. Cable and home video helped it find its audience and it is a lot of fun, just not my favorite Chase film.
