Romancing the clone
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday February 13, 2010
Valentine's DayDirected by Garry MarshallScreenplay by Katherine Fugate from a story by Katherine Fugate and Abby Kohn and Marc SilversteinRated MRunning time 124 minutesCinemas EverywhereThis rom-com has star power but little new to say about the game of love. HERE we have Love, Actually, LA style. It's a Valentine's Day ensemble comedy directed by Pretty Woman's Garry Marshall, whose years as a rom-com veteran have netted him a cast of Hollywood stars, old and new.Some of them glitter, some merely glimmer and a few may have signed up only because everybody else had. All ages are represented. There's a precociously lovelorn 10-year-old and at the other end of the generational spectrum is his grandmother, played by a skittish Shirley MacLaine.In the most unlikely bit of casting, Ashton Kutcher runs the florist shop at the centre of the plot and Julia Roberts makes a modest appearance as a US Army captain snatching 24 hours' leave. She spends much of the picture in uniform, slumped sleepily in an economy aircraft seat and there's hardly a trace of the celebrated smile. I'm not sure what this signals. Twenty years on, has Pretty Woman morphed into Weary Woman? Or maybe she just wanted to act - a reasonable desire, I guess, in a film where everyone else seems to have been instructed to act up.Once again, the aim is to talk about love in its various manifestations but you won't be buoyed by the air of happenstance which enlivens the work of Love, Actually's creator, Richard Curtis, when he's at his most inspired. The script is very much "a vehicle", with the lumbering sense of deliberation that comes from having to accommodate so many names and all their contractual entitlements.One of the heartiest laughs comes up at the start. It's a visual gag - a background shot of a tap-dancing weather girl in the TV studio where Jamie Foxx, as a gung-ho sports reporter, is reluctantly preparing for his next assignment. He's been ordered to leave the sports desk to go out and find a heart-warming Valentine's Day story.This assignment inevitably takes him to the shop owned by Kutcher who makes his first appearance in bed, logically enough. He's proposing marriage to Jessica Alba at the time and when she accepts he's overjoyed but astonished - as well he might be since she's playing the kind of workaholic who goes to sleep clutching her mobile phone.The omens are even less propitious for Jennifer Garner as Kutcher's best friend. She's fallen for Patrick Dempsey from Grey's Anatomy, who's been cast to type as a womanising heart surgeon. Things go seriously wrong for him when he, too, goes to Kutcher's florist shop to order Valentine's Day flowers for both Garner and his wife.The last bed we visit belongs to Topher Grace, who's just slept with Anne Hathaway for the first time. These two have met at work and all is going splendidly. He'll soon have to absorb the news, however, that she has a second job as a phone sex worker or, as she prefers to call it, an "adult phone entertainer".None of this is likely to get your heart racing - or even beating in time to the soundtrack, which is arranged around a predictable list of romantic standards. Marshall also gets busy composing his own love letter to Los Angeles. Among the landmarks sought out by his cameras are the Venice Canals and Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall. He also makes a sentimental pilgrimage to the Pretty Woman hotel, the Beverly Wilshire - a blatant act of self-promotion justified by one of the film's rare moments of satire. In the hotel's restaurant, courting couples are crammed so closely together that they're in danger of mistaking their neighbours' dinners for their own.And, finally, there's a nocturnal trip to the Hollywood Forever cemetery. Among the gravestones of the town's extinguished stars is an outdoor cinema that holds summer screenings of old movies. It's here that MacLaine gets her chance to shine. Cast as a retired actress who goes to the cinema to see one of her own films, she plays her key scene while outlined against a radiant image of her much younger self.The script is hardly brimming with wit. You get the impression that its writers were too preoccupied with the architecture of the storyline to bother with much interior decoration. Most of the humour is broad and the best of it goes to Hathaway, along with Queen Latifah and Jessica Biel, who are cast as a couple of Valentine's Day cynics. Biel, who has a taste for slapstick, clearly enjoys a scene in which she has to wrestle a runaway treadmill to a standstill. Latifah, on the other hand, gets her laughs simply by sitting still and looking quizzical.There are none of the grace notes that Curtis can bring to a comedy when he's in the mood. Nobody equates love with self-sacrifice but love does grow out of friendship and, for once, Marshall does restrain himself from pouring on the syrup that spoils so many of his films.
© 2010 Sydney Morning Herald
