Review: The Discoverers

City Paper grade: B

Not so shockingly, The Discoverers is a film about discovery. That’s partly meant in surface terms, by how Lewis and Clark’s historic expedition permeates the life of Lewis Birch (Griffin Dunne), a lame history professor and even lamer dad. Although Lewis has written a big ol’ book about the journey, his father Stanley (Stuart Margolin) is the true obsessive. When Lewis’ mother dies, he finds himself and his two eye-rolling teenagers tangled up with a gang of Lewis and Clark re-enactors as they try bringing the mourning Stanley, now fully method-acting as Clark, back to earth. The film, despite all of its late-aughts indie mumblecore trappings, is tender and sweet in its depiction of Lewis as a scraggly divorced dad trying to maintain connections with his family and maybe learn — nay, discover (whoa) — just how to make his relationships reverberate. And sometimes that means getting awkward with your 15-year-old daughter. In one of the film’s most intimate moments of character-building, Zoe (Madeleine Martin) gets her first period mid-expedition. All Lewis can do is scratch his head and deadpan, “Uh, congratulations. That’s what people say, right?”