Butler's Cinema Scene

Christopher Plummer, Vera Farminga

“BOUNDARIES” My rating: C+ 

104 minutes | MPAA rating: R

A harried mom, an eccentric child, and a scurrillous grandpa go on a road trip.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

One could argue that “Boundaries,” Shana Feste’s peripatetic comedy, has most everything it needs — save for originality. Despite an exceedingly strong cast there’s an aura of been-there-done-that hanging over the enterprise.

We meet Seattle mom and party planner Laura Jaconi (Vera Farming) at her weekly visit to the shrink.  She’s smart enough to recognize the forces that make her life a comedy of errors, but not smart enough to overcome them.

There are two sources for Laura’s predicament. First there’s her son Henry (Lewis McDougall), a geeky middle schooler who compensates for his outsider status  by drawing nude portraits (from his imagination) of the people in his life. Henry is miserable at his public school and Laura wants to send him to a private operation… but that will take a lot of money.

Then there’s her octogenarian father, Jack (Christopher Plummer), who is being thrown out of his retirement community for secretly operating a marijuana growing business on the premises.

Basically Laura is saddled with two adolescents.

Arrangements are made to move Jack to the Los Angeles home of his youngest daughter, JoJo (Kristen Schaal). But the old man insists that they travel by car.  Laura reluctantly agrees, unaware that the old coot has filled the trunk with weed.  This will be his last delivery run to his long-time customers.

Lewis MacDougall

Along the way Jack recruits young Henry into his illegal schemes.  There are stops to visit old hippie customers (Christopher Lloyd, Peter Fonda) as well as Henry’s dad  (Bobby Cannavale). The latter wastes no time hooking up once again with Laura, who appears incapable of learning from her mistakes.

“Boundaries” is mildly amusing and, in the end, kind of hopeful — Laura discovers she has an admirer in a co-worker (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II).

The scene stealer here is — surprise! — Plummer, whose iconoclastic old codger character is an invitation to have actorish fun. Farminga is appealing in a sort of frustrating, hangdog way, and young MacDougall is fine as the kid who is either not all there or, more likely, too much there.

| Robert W. Butler