Sunny light comedy, but not without shadows. The central character of a small-town psychologist -- both the character and the town are named Mumford -- will naturally have easy access to the murky corners of life. And the neat twist whereby the psychologist himself proves to be a benign imposter (the secret comes out before the movie is half over) simply places him democratically on the same couch with his patients. As their shared name would indicate, the man, in a sense, is the town. The themes are weighty and compelling ones: the universal fears of inadequacy and exposure, the nostalgic yearning to start anew, the secret life, the limits of the imagination up against life's bounty. (When the billionaire modem manufacturer is at work in his underground lab on an automated sex doll, the desired likeness is the standard one of the Playmate-of-the-Month, but when he finally falls for someone in the flesh, it's the black coffee-shop proprietor ten years his senior.) Well-written and well-directed by Lawrence Kasdan, well-paced, well-proportioned, well-photographed in clean bright color, the movie ambles along amusingly from character to character, problem to problem, nothing too dire, yet nothing too pat, either. And right before the last lap to the finish line, it pauses for a pop-song montage (a Bob Seger song, "Till It Shines") in which all of the many characters, alone in their private unresolved dramas, are threaded together by the same melody and lyric, a concise way of saying that they (or we) are all under the same sky and in the same boat. Even pop-song montages, it seems, can have their uses. One bad patch: the flashback to the phony psychologist's previous life, in garish grainy color and jittery jiggly camerawork, goes on far too long and into too much gritty detail. A brief verbal account would have sufficed, and the gritty details, if only for a better laugh, ought to have been left to the "dramatic re-enactment" on Unsolved Mysteries which ultimately unmasks the hero. Loren Dean, Hope Davis, Mary McDonnell, Alfre Woodard, Jason Lee, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Zooey Deschanel, David Paymer, Jane Adams, Dana Ivey, Martin Short, Ted Danson. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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