After a Katherine Eure (Maureen O'Hara) goes to the funeral of a friend she realizes that life is too short to let it slip away and decides to hire a cab to take her to places that hold special memories for her.
She is a woman of substance, elegance and flair but she also has a sense of adventure that people a third of her age will never know. This was initially obvious with the taxi Driver, Mike Donahue (Jason Beghe), who has no wish to know about this side of life and just does his job. The movie highlights the gap between the generations and how the social graces of yesteryear and modern society values have become worlds apart.
As the pair journey through America on her ultimate goal of Canada the initial differences in opinions and social standing dissipate and an understanding of each other and valuable lessons are learned by each one. A lecture by Mike on how dreams and memories are not of consequence when you live for the moment in the real world showed us how, in reality, these things are what are truly important and can give us an inner peace and ability to cope with what goes on around us. The value of true friendship is the most important lesson to be learned here and how, no matter what, they are always there for each other through thick and thin.
There is a story within a story here, and the life of Mike's son, Bobby, and the tug of love he feels between his non-attentive mother, his father and his girlfriend and the feelings of abandonment and being torn are very well acted out by a young but already accomplished Haley Joel Osment.
Maureen O'Hara still has the class she has always had and is one very amazing lady and it was wonderful to see her with Efram Zimbalist Jr, bringing back memories of the golden era of Hollywood. My only complaint I have is that the ending made it so obvious it was a TV Movie and suddenly became like any standard feel-good fare.
All in all though, great cast, good movie (especially since it was based on an amazing factual tale), and very enjoyable.
