“A business traveler should bring only what fits in a carry-on bag. Checking your luggage is asking for trouble. – – Add several travel size packets of detergent so you won’t fall into the hands of unfamiliar laundries. There are very few necessities in this world which do not come from travel-size packets. – – One suit is plenty, if you take along travel size packets of spot remover. The suit should be medium gray. Gray not only hides the dirt, but is handy for sudden funerals. – – Always bring a book as protection against strangers. Magazines don’t last and newspapers from elsewhere remind you, you don’t belong. But, don’t take more than one book. It is a common mistake to overestimate ones potential free time and consequently overpack. In travel, as in most of life, less is invariably more. – – And most importantly, never take along anything on your journey so valuable or dear, that it’s loss would devastate you.”

‘The Accidental Tourist’, directed by Lawrence Kasdan in 1988, is an American comedy drama starring Geena Davis, Kathleen Turner and William Hurt. Davis plays Muriel Pritchett, a dog trainer who meets a travel writer called Macon who has recently lost a son and split with his wife Sarah. Muriel develops an obsession with Macron who, despite the trauma of his son’s loss and the memories of it dredged up by Muriel’s child, goes along with the affair. Macron breaks his leg and spends time with his eccentric family, then goes travelling followed by Muriel, but his wife wishes to come back leading to a complexity of emotions and to Macron needing to make a decision. It’s a chilly, remote movie with Davis’s performance a weird and off-kilter ray of light. The comedy comes from the characters, from the buttoned-down Macron to his dysfunctional family. Macron travels, but the cities he visits are never focused on: instead we see the insides of hotels or anonymous streets, emphasising the point that the film is about a man who travels for a living but really doesn’t go anywhere. This makes for a surprisingly profound statement on loss and love, and on the dependence we have for relationships for both physical release and attention, so in this sense Kasdan’s film is perfectly judged. What it lacks, however, beyond Davis’s character, is a warmth or a beating heart, so by the end of the film, when Macron makes his decision, there isn’t a feeling of catharsis.

Would I recommend it? Yes – but I found it to be a little underwhelming. Watch it for Geena Davis. It would make a good double bill with ‘Dodsworth’, an older film featuring a man making a similar decision.