Dir. James L. Brooks , US, 2010, 121 mins
Cast: Reece Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson, Jack Nicholson
Review by Carol Allen
With writer/director James L. Brooks’ in charge with his experience at skillfully combining comedy and drama in the same dramatic dish ( Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets to name but a few), along with the cast of seasoned and skilful actors that make up the team in this movie, you would be justified in looking forward to a bit of a cinematic feast. It is however sadly a big disappointment.
Witherspoon plays Lisa, a career athlete, whose life has been passionately devoted to softball since childhood. When she’s dropped from the team as being too old at the age of 31 (shades of Black Swan ), she tries to get herself a regular life, which in romantic comedy terms means finding the right bloke. Brooks gives her a choice of two. The first is madly uptight but a bit bland George (Rudd), who works in finance for his overpowering dad Charles (Nicholson) and is about to be investigated by the financial authorities for some sort of serious fiscal fiddling of which he has no knowledge. Could it be something dodgy that Charles has been up to? Do we care? However after a disastrous first dinner date early in the film, when Lisa and George are both reeling from their respective pieces of bad news, Lisa takes up with star baseball pitcher Matty ( Wilson ), a vacuous serial shagger with an idiosyncratic moral code and most of the film’s few good gags. Lisa’s tenuous relationship with George however keeps cropping up. Which one will get the girl? Again, do we care?
Brookes totally bypasses the opportunity offered here to use his proven powers of wit and perception and explore the real dilemma of the career girl hitting an ageist glass ceiling. The role of Lisa requires Witherspoon to be merely cute and girly – a bit of a waste of an actress with the sort of range and iron in her soul, which made the potentially fluffy Legally Blonde films into hits. Rudd is an actor of great charm, most of it here buried under nerdishness, and Nicholson in a comparatively minor role does a blustering impression of the Demon King in panto (not of course that the American audience would know what panto is). The film is rarely funny, even though it’s promoting itself as “a new comedy”, it’s not remotely convincing and the romance element lacks any chemistry or sparkle. And it’s dull and too long to boot. Coming from a first time film maker this would not be good enough. Coming from a skilled veteran like Brooks, it’s verging on the tragic.
