Around the World in Eighty Ways

Dream Note

Mavis Davis has reached her breaking point, and frankly, it's a miracle it took this long. Her younger son Eddie wears headphones approximately 24 hours a day, existing in a permanent state of audio isolation that recently nearly resulted in Mavis's electrocution, which is just the sort of thing that puts a damper on the mother-son relationship. Her older boy Wally is gay and resides in what can only be described as an enormous overripe banana, a living situation that raises questions the film wisely never attempts to answer. And her husband Roly has evolved—or perhaps devolved—into a motionless, sightless, emotionless vegetable, which means he's essentially become a houseplant with a mortgage. So Mavis does what any reasonable woman in her situation would do: she packs her bags and books an around-the-world package tour, leaving this circus of domestic horrors behind like a firefighter leaving a burning building. But this is where the plot thickens into something resembling a fever dream scripted by a committee of exhausted sitcom writers. Dad, the blind and senile patriarch who apparently has been quietly stewing in his vegetable state, discovers that Mavis's travel companion is their deeply despised next-door neighbor. This revelation acts like magical defibrillator paddles to his soul, because suddenly this formerly catatonic man decides to chase his wife across the entire planet. A blind, senile gentleman pursuing his globetrotting spouse around multiple continents is the kind of premise that sounds like it was pitched during a particularly ambitious happy hour. The resulting film is a chaotic family comedy that operates on the principle that the best way to fix a broken household is to scatter all its members across international borders and see what happens. It's unhinged, it's absurd, and it contains the single greatest use of an overripe banana as living accommodation in cinema history. The movie understands that sometimes the only sane response to an insane family is to literally run away, and sometimes the only thing that can jolt a loved one out of their stupor is spite. That's not just comedy; that's philosophy.