Horton Foote has often written incisive character studies that are dramatically underpowered, and this effort by his writer-director son follows in Dad's footsteps. The very model of a small, well-meaning, late-1990s independent movie with no major stars (the biggest, third-billed Margaret Cho, has about five minutes of screen time), it's a little-people-about-their-tasks slice-of-life drama where the good guys mess up, clean up, mess up, clean up, and commit some business errors that seem improbably naive. Cameron Dye has a nice Aidan Quinn soulfulness and Kevin Geer is quietly excellent, but they haven't much to play. As another poster mentioned, it's unconvincingly telescoped -- does all the action take place within a year, with the tavern trying so many formats and suffering so many twists of fate? Also, for what it's worth, where would the "Tavern on Main" be? It's a New York-set film with some authentic-looking locations (and others that smack of Toronto), but the only Main Street in the five boroughs is in Flushing, and these bar patrons are definitely not East Queens stock.
Review of The Tavern
