New in Town - Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson Jan 30, 2009, 19:45 GMT

Lucy Hill (Renée Zellweger) is an ambitious, up and coming executive living in Miami. She loves her shoes, she loves her cars and she loves climbing the corporate ladder. When she is offered a temporary assignment - in the middle of nowhere - to restructure a manufacturing plant, she jumps at the opportunity, knowing that a big promotion is close at hand. What begins as a straight forward job assignment ...more

The warmth of love thaws even the coldest of corporate hearts in this easy-to-take Zellweger vehicle

Okay, so Jonas Elmer’s English language feature film debut is nothing special.  It is just a harmless romantic comedy that is easy to watch and is guaranteed to offend almost nobody.  But Renée Zellweger takes the ball and runs with it as ridiculously out of place Miami manufacturing executive Lucy Hill.  The comedy part is that she is transferred to an impossibly rural small town in Minnesota (New Ulm, gotta love that name) where the maximum winter temperature, indoors, is cold enough to freeze the tapioca in your spoon.

The romance is, well, Harry Connick Jr., playing small time union steward Ted Mitchell.  Lucy is a high powered executive for Munck Foods charged with revamping their Rocket Bar brand (the names alone should elicit some laughs).  She is sent as super hatchet woman to cut the plant staff in half in time for Christmas.  But instead of replacing people with robots, she falls in love with New Ulm.  Oh, yes, she falls in love with Ted, too.

Zellweger---9 out of 10.  Connick---5 out of 10.  Romance and a sweet ending with a kiss and black ink at the box office---10 out of 10.

Director Elmer is joined by newcomer writers Ken Rance and C. Jay Cox all of whom apparently decided to play it very safe with this film.  There is very little that is not predictable about the story, the filming and the directing.  The frozen Minnesota setting was simulated with actual shooting in frozen Winnipeg, Manitoba, a place where people eat cold for breakfast.  When Lucy exits the airport and runs into a frozen blast of air she doesn’t need ten years of method acting to come out with a very funny exclamation and immediate about face. 

The background alternates between warm family household settings and frozen exterior shots.  The frozen shots are copies of “Fargo,” “A Simple Plan,” “Frozen River, etc., without the creepiness.  Elmer uses a very hip and peppy soundtrack (music director John Swihart, also tunester for “Napoleon Dynamite”) to remind the audience that it is all in fun and there are no corpses lurking beneath the snow.  Only during Lucy’s most down period in the middle of the film does the frozen landscape feature the haunting spikes of frozen leafless trees and the rime covered freight train rolling into the frozen fog to express her despair (don’t worry, it doesn’t last long).

By the halfway point Lucy is wearing a fur hooded parka just like the locals.  At least, just like extremely sheltered Americans might think northerners wear.  Actually, people in cold climates wear down parkas, watch caps and balaclavas---but that’s not nearly as much fun as the bear fur hoodies.  Five minutes later she is marching with them and singing Christmas carols by the campfire.  Miami Lucy is going native!

The film crosses the line with Lars von Trier favorite Siobhan Fallon playing local personality Blanche Gunderson (she also played Martha in “Dogville” and Brenda in “Dancer in the Dark”).  Her accent and mannerisms are immediately recognizable copies of Frances McDormand’s police chief Marge Gunderson in ”Fargo” but nowhere near as well done.  Her exaggerated northern hick persona comes off like poor makeup and costumes, it screams to be pathetic.

J.K. Simmons fares only slightly better as plant manager Stu Kopenhafer.  His character has a beard and it cuts the legs out from under Simmons classic long-faced humor.  The rest of the character actors might as well be cardboard cut-outs, background for Zellweger.  Most of them are as gray as the icy atmosphere pervading most of the scenes.

The jury is still out on Harry Connick Jr. as an actor.  As to screen chemistry with Zellweger, don’t count on it.  But he does a good enough job playing a fairly simple and stereotypical rube.  The tapioca fights, emergency surgery on Lucy’s stuck Carhartt zipper and her drunken pratfalls are fun enough without being in poor taste.  The last five minutes are filled with terribly sappy flashbacks but in the end love prevails.

Fun for the whole family and a wonderfully correct first-date film.  All is well in New Ulm.

Directed by: Jonas Elmer
Written by: Ken Rance and C. Jay Cox

Starring: Renée Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr.

Release: January 30, 2009
MPAA: Rated PG-13 for brief strong language
Runtime: 96 minutes
Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Color