Though the title might lead one to expect some kind of disaster story or tense thriller, Safe Passage is actually a family drama about the strength of the home fire’s eternal flame. The camera hardly ever leaves the confines of the Singer family household and even when it does, it’s only to illustrate some point about the family. At its center is wife and mother Mag Singer (Sarandon), whose large brood gathers around her during a time of crisis. Mag was young when she married her sexy husband Patrick (Shepard) and, as she puts it, “One minute I was hot for Patrick and the next I had seven sons.” Now six of the seven are grown and have left the house, leaving behind only the youngest — 14-year-old Simon (Stahl). Feeling that she has spent her entire adult life tending to her children’s needs (“I was 35 years old before I could enjoy a meal without having to cut up someone else’s meat.”) and irked by some of her husband’s habits, Mag has kicked her hubby out of the house and she’s planning to move someplace smaller with her 14-year-old and take a civil service exam so that she can get employment as a social worker. But then word suddenly arrives that her most troublesome son, Percival, who had joined the Marines to get away from family tensions, may have been in a barracks that was blown up in the Middle East. The news brings the whole Singer clan together for a noisily interactive weekend of waiting, watching for TV news bulletins, and reflecting on the past and future. The house is in complete disarray, with Mag’s half-packed moving boxes scattered through every room in the house and her tendency to blast classical music at top volume, and husband Patrick’s mysteriously recurrent episodes of temporary blindness. Nuthouse may be a more apt description of the place, but what arises out of all the turbulence is the rediscovery of their appreciation of and need for each other. Though Mag has been something of an obsessive mother, she seriously doubts her efficacy and performance in the role, seeing only her failures and ignorance. Over the course of the family crisis, she comes to recognize some of the successes of her chaotic and instinctive child-rearing methods. Her sons are all making it into manhood as swell people, proving that she must have done something right. She provided a safe passage for their journey into adulthood. Primarily, the movie is a showcase for Sarandon’s acting. The flourishes of her characterization communicate Mag’s unreasonable quirks, great sensitivity, naïve foolishness, lustful emotions, and irrational behaviors. If only the other characters were as sharply drawn as hers, Safe Passage would be much stronger. As is, the movie is largely schematic. Also, it plays too heavily, like one of those “mommy syndrome,” self-help fictions that make resolutions so much easier and more final than they ever are in reality.
This article appears in January 6 • 1995 (Cover).
