In the 1990's, I took a screenwriting class at San Francisco State University from Fielder Cook. One of the movies Fielder screened for us was Too Far to Go, one of his own films that he was quite proud of. Too Far to Go is an unusual film inasmuch as it tells its story in reverse; the movie begins with a couple's unhappy divorce, and works its way slowly backwards in time to their optimistic wedding ceremony many years earlier. What is interesting about this movie is not the divorce itself -- which is literally the opening scene -- but the character story that unfolds as we gradually move backwards in time and learn more about the couple. We also get to see the effect that our foreknowledge of the eventual outcome has on our perception of the events we witness while various mistakes and betrayals evaporate as the characters move backwards in time. It's a fascinating conceit for a film, and one well worth watching at least once.
Fielder Cook said one thing about screenwriting that I will always remember: "There is nothing more boring than a character SAYING that they're going to do something, and then just DOING that something." Fielder taught us that the interest in a story, the thing that grabs the audience's curiosity and invests them in the characters, is when a character SAYS that they're going to do something, but then ends up doing something else instead. WHY are they doing this unintended thing? The reasons WHY they end up doing this unintended thing end up revealing much more about the character and make the story more interesting than just having someone do exactly what they say that they're going to do at the outset. The reason why I mention this is because Too Far to Go was one of the main films that Fielder used to illustrate this approach to screenwriting. The story of this film is the literal embodiment of the concept... after all, most people do not intend to divorce when they get married.
My personal feeling at the time was that Fielder occasionally took his maxim a little too much to heart, and ended up making his films overly complicated as a result. Occasionally, a character needs to do something boringly straightforward to keep a story from snowballing out of control. But the essential principle is spot on. When it comes to the main events of your story, there is nothing more boring than a character saying that they're going to do something, and then just doing it; that's a missed opportunity for character development as well as a missed opportunity to grab the audience's curiosity with your character story. Modern screenplays would be greatly improved if their writers followed Fielder Cook's advice.
My memory is not great, so I recall very little about the details of this film except that I thought Blythe Danner gave one of her best performances in it. I was not a fan of Michael Moriarty at the time, but I thought that he gave a much better performance than usual too. The screenplay certainly gave the actors a lot of good material!
This is not a feel good film; if you want escapism, look elsewhere. But if you want to watch a fascinating character study from a master in the art, this film will teach you a lot. I don't think Fielder was extraordinarily wise about what made people tick (particularly women), but he certainly knew how to tell a story in an interesting way!
