The buzz is out about the forthcoming film Sweet Home Alabama. It certainly has one of the best trailers in years ...Whether or not you agree with Larry's trenchant analysis of cinematic pre-release promotion and publicity, I think you will agree from painful experience that a good trailer does not necessarily mean a good movie. (At least this time, he hasn't actually pronounced the movie to be one of the best in years; of course, he usually reserves that distinction for the movies that give him a cameo.) Sweet Home Alabama's trailer is mediocre at best, and the movie fails to live up to even that standard. I mean, I expected it to suck, but holy cow! It didn't just suck, it blended familiar, stereotypically sucky elements, steeped them with the infusion of a whole new stench of awfulness, and poured the rancid tea of a deeply unfunny and unromantic romantic comedy. It offends women, northerners, southerners, and gays through tired and obsolete stereotypes, and it's especially offensive to anyone who believes movies should be, like, enjoyable or have a passing acquaintance with creativity or even be watchable. I closed my eyes a lot because the inside of my eyelids was more interesting that what was going on on-screen. I got to the point where I was laughing the strangled, despairing laugh of those who have lost all hope. At least the strained laughter kept me from crying -- or maybe vomiting.
--One of Larry King's breathtakingly random and moronic thought fragments from King's Things
Reese Witherspoon plays a successful fashion designer, which, assuming she designed the outfits she wears, is kind of like how "Beverly Hills 90210" tried to present Donna as a fashion maven instead of the fashion victim she so clearly was. Reese's precious little problem is that her adorable boyfriend has just proposed to her (a scene the movie presents like porn for women frantically seeking that MRS degree with an MBA: an orgy of sparkling diamond rings laid out on counter upon counter, with warm, twinkly lighting and thrilling music and lascivious, teasingly lingering close-ups), but she's still technically married to her high-school sweetheart back home in 'Bama and inconveniently has to go back to ask him for a divorce.
Like many other movies, Sweet Home Alabama aggressively posits that them big cities are corrupting and evil, while clean country living is pure and 100% natural. I mean, you can see why: poor misguided Reese only thinks she's happy with a job she loves; a good reputation she's earned through her own initiative, creativity, courage, and hard work; and a sweet, adoring fiancé (the son of the New York City mayor, no less). It's not till she comes back to the land where the skies are so blue, where women bring their babies into rowdy roadhouses, hound dogs moan, and 90% of the area jobs involve either factories or diners, that she realizes this is where she belongs, because lord knows if you're born in the country, that's damn well where you'd best stay, because cities is meant for city folks.
For once, Witherspoon doesn't rise above the material. She's like a slightly edgier Meg Ryan, cuteness in full deployment with pouty foot-stomping and brow-furrowing to indicate she's puzzled and/or thinking, but bland and predictable nevertheless. She doesn't even look particularly good. Reese is capable of doing so much better, and (among the other things about this movie that pissed me off) it pisses me off to have her wasting her time with this crap instead of doing something like Election, or even Legally Blonde, where at least she was good, even if the rest of the movie wasn't. Particularly since she apparently switches off with her husband so only one of them is working at a time. Ryan Philippe used his turn wisely with Igby Goes Down -- couldn't she have held up her end of the bargain a little more productively? It reminds me of a remark I read recently about Paul Newman, that he does maybe one movie every year or two, so he can't have been too happy with how Message in a Bottle turned out.
The two husbands/boyfriends/whatever are utterly uninteresting and interchangeable, and that goes for both the actors and their characters. Fred Ward, as Reese's dad, looks tired and defeated, as though he's reflecting on a career that kicked off with The Right Stuff and had him working with directors like Robert Altman, Michael Apted, Jonathan Demme, and Philip Kaufman, but has since spiraled steadily downward, through wretched sequels (Tremors 2, The Crow: Salvation) and minor "Saturday Night Live" stars' vanity projects (Joe Dirt, Corky Romano) to wind up in this dustbin. (Nevertheless, his Confederate re-enacting character does manage to put a little life into his exclamation, "The South will rise again!", which, weirdly and somewhat unsettlingly, much of the theater applauded.)
The only sparkle among this dross is Candice Bergen, who rips into her caricature as the conniving, self-centered mayor of New York like a lioness with a gazelle. She spits out her dull, ABC-Family-Night-sitcom-ready lines with enough vigorous crankiness to get a laugh. It's really too bad that her character is a lazy (and, I had thought, outdated) stereotype of the successful, powerful career woman -- a cold, calculating, selfish bitch. The not-too-subtle implication is that Reese has started on this path by being in New York in the first place and working hard to be successful and do what she wants to do, and if she marries the son of this shrew, she'll slide irredeemably down the slope to career-gal bitchdom.
The witty, piquant banter in the movie runs along the lines of, "You dumb redneck!" and "You hoity Yankee bitch!" (It's like they're channeling the Algonquin Round Table!) It's amazing that a movie can get away with smacking on southerners like this; they say things like "them fancy shoes" and ask their husbands if they'd like a chicken-fried steak (why not add hush puppies and grits and redeye gravy and collard greens and chitlins?). One native even exclaims about his trip to New York City, "I never seen anything like that before!" Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel is a sensitive, modulated portrayal of the modern Southern man next to these people. As for the winners in the Civil War, essentially "Yankee bitch" sums up the wit and depth of the complaints against us. The movie divides women into selfish, icy, career women or adoring homebodies popping out babies or pies. If not really homophobic, it's pretty condescending to gays -- then again, I suppose it's condescending to everyone. Although it doesn't have any racial bigotry (heck, it barely even has any non-white people), that's probably only because even the nitwits who made this film realized they couldn't make racism "cute."
Most rewardingly, we are treated to unearthed gems of the down-home wisdom of simple country folks. Along the lines of that Texan or Tenneesean saying ("Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again"), Reese's mother replies to her daughter's whine that she's spoiled everything with the poignant, profound Alabamian adage, "These plums might look spoiled to some people, but I know that the almost ruined ones make the sweetest jam." That is so true! This pithy saying subtly touches the heart of the ultimate truth of human existence! (It also made me almost pull a muscle, I was trying so hard to keep my laughter manageable and also to keep myself from sobbing in despair at the desolate waste of money, time, and talent this movie was.)
Some movies look spoiled, but the almost ruined ones don't make much of anything. (At least the completely ruined ones get a long and productive life as "bad movies we love... for me to poop on!", and the spoiled ones live eternally on USA, TNT, TBS, and TNN.)
"I can't see any more movies about hit men or serial killers right now. I mean, enough already. I'm sure that even real-life hit men go through the movie ads and say, 'Isn't there anything with Reese Witherspoon?'"Yes, there is -- but the hitmen are better off staying at home and using the movie ads to make a papier-mâché gun.
--Libby Gelman-Waxner, Premiere Magazine, October 2002
[Oh, and I forgot to mention that I got free crap, which generally predisposes me to give a movie a little slack, but neither the free stuff nor the movie warranted leniency. I got a nail file with a movie ad on the back (several, actually, because this was at a bar the night before when they were handing out the passes, and hardly anyone showed up) and lip gloss in what looked like a pinkish fuchsia but actually turned out to look okay on me (unlike Christy's, which was a horrific shade of pink and wouldn't have looked good on anyone old enough to drive a car). They also had black t-shirts with "Sweet Home Alabama" in hot-pink script, but they were the teeny kind that are supposed to be really tight and short and show your stomach. The smallest looked like something you'd put on a dachshund (a dachshund you really hated), and the largest wouldn't have even fit over my head, much less... ah, other parts of my anatomy.]
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