But it is Mottola’s brilliance that Carl’s emotional rock bottom is quickly followed by a great visual joke: humiliated, Carl retreats to the buffet, only to find himself unexpectedly onstage. Glasses clink; toasts begin. Panicking, Schreiber performs an awkward, smiling shuffle, trying to exit, only to be blocked in as the author begins to speak, cheerily describing her book as an “account of devastating spiritual asphyxiation,” then announcing that she is about to read a “selection of journal entries from the year 1976.” Polite to the end, Carl can only cross his arms, sweat it out, and endure.

Each actor gets multiple moments like this, in which goofy slapstick and emotional pain overlap, each intensifying the other. In a witty visual bank shot, Eddie makes eye contact with Eliza, waiting for Louis at his office, as he lobs put-downs at the pathetic Aaron. Rita chases Louis down the street, then shrieks insults at her husband, a wrenching moment that pivots, a second later, into something darkly hilarious as she topples over like a felled tree, causing Jo to mutter, “Don’t go into the light, Mom.”

Throughout, Mottola turns the constraints of low-budget filmmaking into benefits. That station wagon, for instance: Mottola didn’t have the equipment to film the whole ensemble together, so he did it in sections, the actors and cameramen hopping in and out while the director himself huddled under a blanket with the soundman, delivering lines for the offscreen actors who had had to give up their seats. Yet these scenes never feel choppy or artificial; they flow organically, moving from chatter to glances out the window, broken by shots of Jim’s disgusted face, filmed from Eliza’s back-seat view. In between, there’s silence, scored with soaring voices and gentle percussion, as we cut to shots of highway signs, helping to situate the viewer while also capturing the meditative, numbed-out mind-set of a long drive.

Often enough, the acting is the action. Posey’s expressions alone tell an entire substory about her changing relationship to Carl’s novel: At first, she’s his hype man (“Carl wrote a novel, everyone! It’s great, it’s just far-out”), stroking his arm, playing defense with her parents (“It’s Dr. Seuss for adults, Mom”). But gradually microexpressions of contempt begin to flicker in her eyes. Midway through, Jo starts scribbling on red lipstick as Carl narrates, until he crosses a line of inanity—“Exactly! He’s a pointer who can’t point”—and suddenly those bright-red lips curl, behind his back, where no one can see. The costumes are just as perfectly chosen, suggesting character alliances as they shift. At first, Jo and Carl are childlike twins, in long red and green scarves, until she frantically strips off layers, determined to enter that book party hot and single (Posey’s rebel turquoise-and-yellow eye makeup deserves its own essay). In Ronnie’s living room, Ronnie and Jim wear comically identical puffy jackets, baseball hats, and frowns, sitting together with crossed arms, each a conscientious objector to his own family drama.

The dialogue-free sequence in which Eliza finally finds Louis on the roof is among the movie’s most beautifully constructed: As she walks through the roof door, the crowd is out of focus, a blur, as are the strung lights, reflecting Eliza’s disorientation. Then she spots Louis’s smiling jaw, his shining eyes. The camera frames her face for a long moment as we watch her watching him, in relief—not a stranger, just her husband. She beams, seeing his Groucho Marx grin, as he blows smoke and drops his head, bends his knees, and dances lower, creating the illusion that he’s disappearing into the floor. For an instant, Louis is obscured by strangers, half of them smoking. Then he rises up from the crowd and walks over and kisses Sandy, who turns out to be not a woman but a man, as elegantly dressed and handsome as Louis is. It’s a romantic moment for him that is a devastation for her.

Although I hadn’t seen the movie in years before I rewatched it for this essay, I still remembered that liquid, erotic sequence vividly—one of many in this film in which one person’s liberation doubles as another person’s destruction. The sexual politics may read differently now, for younger audiences, reflecting as they do a transitional moment in the late nineties, an anxious, claustrophobic, half-in/half-out period for gay men. But Davis’s look of shock, the specificity of the couple’s marriage, Louis’s seductive cockiness, Eliza’s warmth and her reflexive self-doubt lend the moment enormous weight, chemistry created by Davis and Tucci in just a few short scenes.

Their final confrontation is a doozy. As Eliza peppers him with questions, Louis tries to smile and evade, glancing down, a caught dog. Frustrated, Eliza keeps asking—Is it serious? Is he in love? “I don’t know what it is,” Louis says, and he begins to stutter, to repeat himself, his charm breaking down. Instead of playing the scene purely as vulnerability, Tucci infuses it with fear and anger, his voice rising until he glares at Davis, radiating his words as a threat: “I’m confused, and you have to help me. Okay?” It’s the moment that Eliza knows that she can walk away—that it’s not her role to be his cheerleader, his support system. She has her family to take care of her, after all.

The Daytrippers ends with the two sisters walking together down a Manhattan street, their arms wrapped around each other. Nothing is resolved, but something cataclysmic has happened. The mystery the family has been struggling to solve isn’t really about Louis, in the end—it’s about Rita, the mother, who in any other movie might be a monster. Meara’s unvarnished performance makes her something deeper: a figure of pathos whose idea of love is blaring the message that her daughters are nothing without a smart man, as if she were a broken foghorn steering them into the rocks. It’s Carl who breaks that spell, with a small but crucial act: after Rita calls Jo a “foolish girl” for breaking up with him, he responds, “No, actually, she’s not.” It’s a throwaway remark, underplayed, on a public street, where anyone could hear. It makes me cry, every time.

Mottola still lands a joke, in the end. Before Jo walks off to comfort her sister, Carl assures her that he’ll stay, to keep her mother and father from killing each other. “How do you plan to do that?” she asks. Carl smiles at her, finally able to take himself less seriously, a different kind of happy ending: “Soothe them to sleep with the last chapter of my novel?”