Plot
An immigration lawyer named Mac (Kevin Kline) finds himself at the mercy of potential muggers when his car breaks down in a bad part of Los Angeles late at night. The muggers are talked out of victimizing Mac by Simon (Danny Glover), a tow truck driver who arrives just in time. After that night Mac sets out to befriend Simon, despite their having nothing in common.
Meanwhile, Mac's wife Claire (Mary McDonnell) and best friend Davis (Steve Martin) a producer of violent action films, are also experiencing life-changing events, when Claire encounters an abandoned infant as she is jogging and becomes determined to adopt it. Davis suddenly becomes interested in philosophy more than box-office profits after being shot in the leg by a man trying to steal his watch, and announces that he will devote the remainder of his career to eliminating violence from the cinema.
The film chronicles how these characters – as well as various acquaintances, co-workers and relatives – are affected by their interactions in the light of these life-changing events. In the end, all the characters converge at the Grand Canyon on a shared vacation trip, united in a place that is philosophically and actually "bigger" than all their little separate lives.
Read more about this topic: Grand Canyon (1991 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“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)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)