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New in Town
There’s nothing new about New in Town, unless you consider it a new low for Renée Zellweger. As in Leatherheads, she’s shooting for a golden oldie screwball romantic comedy vibe – and missing. She’s Lucy Hill, a corporate executive on the fast track to success in Florida, the Sunshine State. Her sexist colleagues pack her off to retool a Minnesota factory the corporation has taken over. That means lay-offs, union unpleasantness and at least a couple of long months in the freezing cold. It’s a thankless task, and the big city sophisticate is unimpressed with folksy yokels who give thanks to the Lord before they tuck into their homespun cooking. They’re not too impressed with her either. You can see where this is heading I’m sure. In fact, if you’ve seen Diane Keaton in Baby Boom, you’ve already been here and done this. This cold fish out of water gradually grows gills: Lucy realises her pursuit of success and money can’t compete with small town virtues like friendship, community and a statuary day off for the start of the ice-fishing season. Her big thaw is reflected in her initially thorny relationship with local union rep Ted (Harry Connick Jr - an actor who either plays salt of the earth hunks or redneck psychos, and nothing in between). Yes, they hate each at first, but guess who saves Lucy’s butt when she skids off the road in a blizzard and might have froze to death? And guess who’s a widower with a teenage daughter badly in need of a mother’s guidance right now?
The clichés wouldn’t matter one bit if the jokes were funnier, or indeed, funny at all. But they’re not. Lucy is such a smart cookie she arrives in Minnesota wearing a skirt, hur-hur! And no bra – which means poor Renee has to play a five-minute scene with erect nipples. Hilarious! If that’s not humiliating enough, how about the scene when she goes crow shooting but can’t remove her overalls when she needs to take a pee?! What does the song say? "Sometimes it’s hard, to be a woman." Mind you, for a movie with such a sentimental opinion of rural life, the locals are a dim bunch of rubes. Played by the likes of J.K. Simmons (Juno), Frances Conroy and Siobhan Fallon, they speak with that elongated Fargo uplift, and while they’re “nice” enough on the surface, they’re all suffering from intellectual atrophy that seems to have set in circa 1959. (For a rather different view, try Charlize Theron’s travails in this self-sustaining man’s world in North Country.) But it’s Renee’s show, really, and I’m sorry, but I think she’s almost unwatchable now that she’s sold her soul to the Botox devils. Forty in April, she’s obviously decided that unblemished skin is more important to a movie actress than the ability to express emotion – with the unfortunate result that she seems to be suffering from permanent face-ache. All is not lost. Toning down the cosmetics and (I assume) laying off the injections for the western Appaloosa last year she gave her best performance in a long, long time. But then of course nobody saw it.
What else is there to say? I guess you could claim that the movie anticipated the economic depression and even extols a kind of commune set up that Naomi Klein might approve of. But that’s more of a mark of how deeply indebted it is to the New Deal populism espoused by Frank Capra in pictures like Meet John Doe and It's a Wonderful Life. Unlike those Capra fantasies, New in Town has nothing to tell us about real life predicaments. Like Zellweger, it would rather play it cute and smooth over the wrinkles. Tom Charity 
More information about New in Town » Critics' Reviews
Youll find no ill will directed towards Renée Zellweger here: she subscribes to a definition of leading-ladydom... read more on www.timeout.com Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |
Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out