Plot
Dr. Ralph Wyman (Matthew Modine) and his wife, Marian (Julianne Moore), meet another couple, Stuart and Claire Kane (Fred Ward and Anne Archer) at a concert and make a spontaneous Sunday dinner date, but both marriages show their cracks over the weekend. While Ralph and Marian Wyman avoid a taboo topic that is undermining their marriage, Stuart goes on a fishing trip with some buddies (Buck Henry and Huey Lewis) and they discover a dead body in the water. Upon his return, Claire is horrified to discover that Stuart and his buddies left the girl in the water until the end of the weekend so they could continue fishing.
Meanwhile, waitress Doreen Piggot (Lily Tomlin), whose husband Earl (Tom Waits) is a verbally abusive alcoholic, accidentally hits young Casey Finnigan (Zane Cassidy) with her car. When the little boy walks away from the accident, she assumes he is all right, but never learns of the fatal consequences, or the harassment his parents, Howard (Bruce Davison) and Ann Finnigan (Andie MacDowell), must face from the local baker (Lyle Lovett) who is livid because Casey's birthday cake was never picked up. Howard's estranged father, Paul Finnigan (Jack Lemmon) drops by the hospital after a 20-year absence and relates the story of his own infidelity. Doreen's daughter, Honey (Lili Taylor), is married to Bill Bush (Robert Downey, Jr.), a man aroused by sadism. Their party buddies, Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn), face marital problems of their own, as Lois earns her living as a phone-sex operator, leaving Jerry (a pool cleaner who has the Finnigans as clients) with a wife whose attitude toward sex is indifferent at best.
Gene Shepard (Tim Robbins) is a corrupt cop who cheats on his wife, Sherri (Madeleine Stowe), and seems oblivious to the fact that his wife long ago had discovered his secret—and just does not care. Gene's mistress is realtor Betty Weathers (Frances McDormand), and Sherri's ultimate confidante is Marian, her sister.
These stories are woven together with musical bridges performed by Zoe (Lori Singer), a depressed cellist, and her embittered, jazz singer mother, Tess (Annie Ross), who live next to the Finnigans.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)