Even the thespian skills and personal appeal of Kathy Baker, Maria Bello, Emily Blunt, Amy Brenneman, Hugh Dancy, Maggie Grace, Jimmy Smits and Kevin Zegers can’t save this clumsy and clichéd uber chick flick.
They’re denying that it’s a chick flick but it most assuredly is and the problem with that is that it turns its back on half the populace with an impatient shrug/insult.
Quoting Jane Austen doesn’t cut it, for sure, and does not give the film a literary polish by any means. It should stand on its own merits, which it doesn’t. It has the saccharin flavor of Steel Magnolias and the inevitable happy conclusion.
Let’s not get into the ways and means. I don’t know enough about Austen to sort it all out. Brenneman says she’s one character, while her movie husband Smits says his character ‘feels’ like one from a different book altogether.
Some of the characters border on obnoxious and types. There is the loud and brassy one, the victim, the idealist, the commitment-phobe and the sexual rebel are partnered with patient males (and a female) Smits, Zegers and Dancy doing their best not to scratch their heads in wonderment at this tight, impenetrable wall of women.
Men join book clubs don’t they? Dancy’s character joins for the wrong reasons, but at least he reads the books while weighing two different relationships with fellow members. He seems dopey.
The women tell each other what to do, calling it support, and bully each other into living out her own dreams or ideas of what is correct behaviour – like Austen’s gossips.
The performances can’t be faulted because they are across the board capable and entertaining. I’d single out Maria Bello’s as the best performances, if pressed. It is an ensemble piece and I give them all their well earned due.
The script is the problem. The idea is delightful and the ending is suitably teary but the labour for that reward – chicks love to cry at movies, is that the idea– is just too much. I would have liked to see something real and unresolved at the end but the threads are tied up into a pretty bundle.
Because it’s not Jane Austen redux, it’s a movie for contemporary audiences.
Still people enjoy the order that Austen’s world imposes. It’s comfort food for these tough times. In Swicord’s hands, its comfort food with too much frosting.
Why are women shortchanged time and time again, especially when put together in a film?
Whatever happened to Thelma and Louise?
Oh, right.
Well, where’s the new generation?
Runtime: 106 minutes
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