I'm sure that a guy like Will would, in real life, be a total asshole, but he's pretty cool in a movie. Like Rob in High Fidelity, Will winces at those with less "discerning" tastes and regards with supercilious disdain his married, child-rearing friends. When one of his nesting friends coos patronizingly and reproachfully at him, "You'll end up childless and alone," he replies with an easy grin, "Well, fingers crossed, yeah," which made me beam. Looking for uncomplicated relationships, Will stumbles into the rich dating pool of single mothers, which leads him to Marcus (Nicholas Hoult, who has creepy-ass eyebrows), a bullied, decidedly uncool boy with a suicidal mother, Fiona (Toni Collette, sporting an unappealing hippie/mental-patient look). Marcus latches on to Will, who finds himself teaching the boy how to be cool and reluctantly growing attached to him. (Of course, in the facile plotting of Hollywood movies, this makes Will a better man.)
This is definitely Hugh Grant's best role in a long time. He doesn't stutter once. He doesn't bashfully dip his eyes or writhe in self-consciousness. He looks leaner, harder, more self-assured, sporting a spikier personality to go with his new hairdo. As appealing as that Shy Hugh shtick was, this is far sexier -- and funnier. The look on his face when Marcus and Fiona duet soulfully on Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly" -- a spectacularly inappropriate song for a child and his suicidal mother to bond over -- is priceless.
Don't be frightened off by the promotional campaign being waged by Lifetime Television. If what you want to see is a feckless, irresponsible boy learning that maturity means settling down, you can certainly find that "lesson" in the movie. All around me were women (and maybe men, for all I know, but the women were the only ones being vocal about it) who were exactly the type Will would have regarded with baffled horror. They cooed over the occasional cute-baby shot and clucked disapprovingly at Will's quips about the joys of being unattached. They just knew some adorable moppet would teach Will how to love, and so his bad-boy behavior up until his salvation could be laughed at easily. But take it from me -- the commitment-phobe, the allergic-to-cute, the chick-flick averse can all make it through this movie happily. Sweetness is sprinkled liberally, but mostly uncloyingly (until the end); for instance, it's endearing and poignant to see Marcus's futile attempts to cheer up his mother -- he wears a sweater with rainbows, buys bright flowers, and scrutinizes Fiona tirelessly for signs of sadness. But the movie is very funny as well, so you can mostly sidestep those tiresome emotions.
At the screening I went to, the writers/directors, Chris (who played Chuck in Chuck and Buck and who is mind-blowingly gorgeous, even more so than when he's in a movie, probably because he was now surrounded by tons of average-to-ugly people) and Paul Weitz showed up to introduce the movie. They noted that About a Boy opens the same day as Attack of the Clones -- Chris said, "I don't know about the rest of you, but I know I'll be seeing Star Wars that day" -- so they shamelessly asked us to tell everyone we know and don't know to see their movie. (Consider yourselves told.) They were supposed to do a Q&A after the movie as well, but their schedule changed, and they only had time to hang out by the exit and chat. I really wanted to talk to them, but I couldn't think of any brilliant questions to ask them and didn't want to just be an autograph pest like the guy that I got in [he had come up to me in line before the movie started and begged me to let him in on my pass; I did, and he ended up monopolizing the Weitz brothers for most of the time they stuck around after the movie and shoving into their faces half a dozen things for them to autograph, most of which were no doubt on eBay before the night was out. I felt like an asshole. This is what I get for being nice to people -- like, I very nicely moved to let two women sit next to me, and they talked through the whole movie, and the one next to me took off her shoes, unleashing a stench that mingled with the nachos of the guy in front of me (and whoever had the idea of introducing stinky food like nachos and hot dogs into movie theaters should be shot) to create an unholy funk that almost made me sick. All because I was nice. Well, never again].
Where was I? Right -- the movie. Very funny.
Go see
it, before or after Attack of the Clones.
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