The South Falls, Again
So there’s no confusion: The star of Sweet Home Alabama is Reese Witherspoon, who graces the film’s poster in full-body pout and appears on the press kit in close-up mug-shot smirk. Witherspoon is Hollywood’s new $15 million girl, a price befitting anyone who could take a bound-for-Blockbuster, pretty-plain-even-in-pink movie like last year’s Legally Blonde and turn it into a $100 million hit. Critics doused the movie in gasoline but slathered whipped cream upon the 26-year-old Witherspoon. It says plenty about the wretched state of the studio-movie business that critics would trash such a slight and insipid movie but recommend it nonetheless because of a single performer; as such, Legally Blonde was so awful they’re making another one. Till then, here’s more cud to chew on.
Witherspoon is “the thinking guy’s cupcake,” according to Salon.com’s Stephanie Zacharek; another writer — from Maxim or maybe The New York Review of Books — calls her “yummy.” Why, then, does this cupcake keep starring in movies as awful for you as a plateful of Twinkies? Maybe she’s a Ding Dong. Sweet Home Alabama is loaded with empty calories, and it’s plenty stale. Anyone remember Doc Hollywood, airing on cable TV since George Bush (the original, not the sequel) was in office? Of course you do, which is why you’ll adore Sweet Home Alabama. It contains the exact same plot.
Witherspoon plays Melanie Carmichael, an up-and-coming New York fashion designer. She possesses a perfectly appointed apartment, works with a cadre of hipsters NBC would love to cast in a Thursday-night series next fall and is engaged to Andrew (Patrick Dempsey), the son of New York City’s mayor. Andrew’s the kind of guy who rents out Tiffany’s when it comes time to propose.
Melanie has but one flaw: bad roots. The kind L’Oreal can’t cover. She hails from a podunk town in Alabama, which worries her future mother-in-law (Candice Bergen, apparently reprising her Miss Congeniality role), who keeps referring to Melanie as “that carbuncle girl.” Worse, Melanie never quite ended her first marriage to childhood sweetheart and soul mate Jake (Josh Lucas), a chicken-fried hunk with a heart of glass who won’t sign the divorce papers, despite the fact he now considers his would-be ex little more than a “hoity-toity Yankee bitch” (big laughs). Just why he won’t sign the papers is something of a mystery, or would be in the real world; in movieland it’s a convenient plot point that pays off at film’s end, around the time Andrew and Melanie are traipse down the aisle … or do they?
You know where this thing’s headed — something about the promotional tagline, “Sometimes what you’re looking for is right where you left it,” gives it away. But the ride can’t be fun or scenic in a film populated by yahoo stereotypes who appear to have been lifted from failed TV pilots: Fred Ward as the proud pop obsessed with Civil War reenactments; Bergen as the snooty bitch inexplicably covered in boils by film’s end, suggesting a whole lot of deleted scenes somewhere; a closeted small-town gay guy — and the black New York fashion designer who will make him a man. Which leaves Witherspoon, that delicious pastry, to throw the movie over her small shoulders and carry it home. The load is light — the movie weighs no more than a glass of flat champagne — but even she can’t withstand the burden. No one could, saddled with lines such as, “You know, I never understood that expression. But no, I am not shitting you.” No, of course she isn’t. Alabama also gets docked for using the title song twice, once by Jewel.
