Greg Mottola's low-pressure charmer Adventureland hasn't done the business it deserved, but as a major studio release, it at least stands the chance of an afterlife on DVD. Maybe if the gods are kind, somebody will roll the dice on getting Mottola's debut film, The Daytrippers, back into print on home video. When this comedy first started drifting into theaters in 1997, it stood apart from the indie-film pack for its unflashiness and lack of condescension towards its middle-class characters. Seen today, it may inspire a certain nostalgia for its movie era: here are the indie-film all-stars of the late '90s in the full bloom of youth, before they started lining up to take on Wolverine or competing with each other to see whose new TV series could get cancelled quickest. The Daytrippers begins with Hope Davis and Stanley Tucci as an apparently happily married couple living in Long Island. Tucci works at a Manhattan publishing firm, and after he heads off for work with plans not to be back home for a couple of days, Davis finds what seems to be a love letter that was written to him by someone named Sandy. Confused and nervous, Davis invites her family--including her parents (Anne Meara and Pat McNamara), her sister (Parker Posey), and the sister's boyfriend, Carl (Liev Schreiber)-- to talk her into believing that it's nothing. The upshot is that the whole pack winds up venturing into the city to confront Tucci, piled into a broken-down station wagon with a busted heater on a late-November day that isn't getting any warmer.
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