Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor (3/30/01)
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Someone Like You. [Tony Goldwyn, 2001. Screenplay by Elizabeth Chandler; after a novel by Laura Zigman.]
More evidence that the contagion Nora Ephron represents has spread: ambitious talk show host Ellen Barkin, determined to be photographed turning over every slimy rock on the continent, the better to ensure her rapid rise to the top of the cesspool gathers about her a crack staff of executive assistants; every one of them, apparently, fucking everyone else. Thus inevitably Ashley Judd falls for The Greg Kinnear Character [establishing once again that disturbingly universal theme of the chick flick, that narcissistic assholes are the most certain babe magnets]; when predictably he dumps her and breaks her heart, in desperation she moves into the picturesque bachelor loft of even-more-attractive coworker Hugh Jackman — himself, it develops, the victim of an emotional hit-and-run, from which he is recovering [as of course all of us Hollywood hunks do] by stuffing his medicine cabinet full of Trojans and nailing an endless string of supermodels.
Here, reflecting on her personal history of romantic failure, she develops a behavioral theory to explain Why Dudes Are Scum — something involving bored bulls and new cows — and allows her buddy Marisa Tomei [the Rosie character] to insinuate the finished manifesto into a national magazine, but panics at the last moment and invents a phony pseudoacademic Doctor-Ruth persona to stand in for her as the author of record. [Why precisely she feels she needs some substantial academic qualification to present herself as an expert on human sexual behavior is never adequately explained; one can easily make the rounds of the talkshow circuit claiming to channel the spirits of the elders of Atlantis.] — Meanwhile she and Jackman are falling for one another; I’ll bet you never saw that coming.
At any rate this is, obviously, just the classic sitcom Predicament, which begins [cf. any hundred episodes of
Lucy] with an innocent white lie that is somehow improbably compounded into a gigantic structure of contradiction which must collapse in a moment of discovery that precipitates a grand finale in which, e.g., Jackman leaves to become a sheep rancher in Montana far from the enforcement of the bestiality statutes, Kinnear opts for an operation to turn himself into a hermaphrodite, Barkin rockets off to terraform Mars, Tomei runs away to join the circus, and Ashley is saved from the nunnery when her longlost uncle returns from India incognito and writes her back into his will after he can’t trick her into selling off his portrait at the estate sale she stages to appease her creditors.
Alas, what the writers actually manage falls somewhat short of this. But it might have been worse.
Ashley can do anything, obviously, but I like her better in film noir. As for Jackman, you have to wonder what Hollywood will do when it runs out of Australian studs; aren’t we running out of continents?
____________Smells like team spirit (3/28/01)
