Imagine you’re 8 and off to start the day as usual, only the car drives past your elementary school and stops four hours later. Surprise! Your parents are getting divorced and now you get to resume third grade in a new town where you have no friends. Goodbye, swingset. Hello, Greyhound on visitation weekends.
We can see how this could turn you into a bookish loner with anxiety issues. Or how it might force you to develop guerrilla social skills, handy for approaching strangers every day as a celebrity and entertainment writer for a daily newspaper. Maybe both.
Anyway, that’s life of Adult Children of Divorce, or “A.C.O.D.,” which is the title of a new movie filmed in Atlanta and coming out Friday.
“I felt like a divorce comedy wasn’t something I’d seen,” said star Adam Scott. He plays Carter, whose parents’ divorce when he was 9 has influenced the professionally successful yet personally stunted adult he has become. His parents, played by Richard Jenkins and Catherine O’Hara, hate each other so intensely that they can’t be in the same room together, so Carter must broker a détente as his brother’s wedding approaches.
Then things go haywire.
“Movies about divorce have always been sort of tragic,” said Stu Zicherman, the movie’s director and co-writer, whose parents parted when he was 11. “The one I lived through had elements of that, but it was also fluid, bizarre and at times, flat-out funny.”
The movie, with Amy Poehler as Carter’s scheming stepmother, Jane Lynch as his kooky therapist, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as his girlfriend and Jessica Alba as his fellow wounded bird, is certainly all of those things.
While keeping up with the plot twists, keep an eye out for Atlanta locations on the screen. The Atlanta Botanical Garden’s Japanese Garden and Rose Garden were used for two of the scenes, while Carter hunts for bling during a scene filmed at Brown & Company Jewelers in Buckhead and summons his quarreling parents to dinner in a scene filmed at Table 1280 at the Woodruff Arts Center. Carter is a busy restaurant owner, and much of the action takes place at No. 246 in Decatur.
“I never actually ate there,” Scott lamented. “I hear it’s delicious. I loved working at the restaurant. It was just a great spot. It was a great little neighborhood.”
This isn’t a spoiler, but we’ll tell you how “A.C.O.D.” ends: with members of the movie crew discussing their parents’ divorces as the credits roll.
“During production, so many crew members came up to me to share their own stories,” Zicherman said. “It made me realize that at the end of the day, ‘A.C.O.D.’ isn’t a movie about divorce, but about the simple notion that we don’t have to turn into our parents. We are free to be our own adults, for better or worse.”
Scott, known for his role with Poehler on “Parks and Recreation” and appearing with Ben Stiller in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” later this year, is an A.C.O.D., too.
“My parents split up when I was little but it was a very amicable, peaceful split,” he said. “I didn’t really relate directly to anything in the story but I did understand it.”
About the Author
