Lawrence requires a trip to the ER. The prognosis? He can’t drive for six months, necessitating his unwilling transportation dependency on his daughter and freeloading bachelor brother — and soon to be chauffeur — Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), who (un)conveniently volunteers to move in to help around the house. Not a blessing in disguise for Lawrence.
The fateful fall has led Lawrence to cross paths with Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), the ER doctor treating him. We’re to believe - in the immortal words of game show host Chuck Woolery - a love connection has been made. It’s obvious in about “two [minutes] and two [seconds]” that Quaid and Parker set off no cardiac sparks between each other — Janet was Professor Wetherhold’s undergraduate student ten years ago. Previously unresolved closure looms.
Janet M.D., weakly serving as the audience’s de facto common sense compass, detects a missing arrhythmia as early as their first dinner date, which she ends abruptly because Lawrence won’t stop droning on about himself. She’s sees him and his family for what they are — pretentious people, not as smart as they think they are. (“You’re the same pompous windbag who made me switch my major from English to Biology”). You never get a second chance to make a first impression, advice Janet doesn’t heed.
Back home, Vanessa and her uncle Chuck are engaged in an altogether different, though equally clumsy, relationship. It’s a cutesy case of role reversal because she is the pseudo-adult, and he’s the arrested-developed, ne’er-do-well uncle. Sense the boundless potential for affectional bonding in this unconventional couple? It comes off almost as weird as it sounds. She tries unsuccessfully to kiss Chuck on the lips, he successfully takes her to a bar and gets her drunk. The family that strays together, stays together. Or something like that.
In a parallel universe, this might have been true were it not so transparently calculating.
A bearded Quaid acquits himself in a respectable manner. An always physically fit looking performer, his perpetually adorned sweater-vests-and-slacks professor manages to convey a beaten down, disheveled look, sporting a subtly descending pooch belly and three-dimensional bags under his eyes.
Following his appointment to chair the search committee charged with anointing the next Carnegie English Department Head, you almost feel sympathy for him when he vainly nominates himself for the position. Almost.
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