Must Love Dogs
At times, it truly amazes me when I look at the quandary of Diane Lane: An actress that is so beautiful, talented, and appealing, who yet squanders her potential time and again on projects that are merely lightweight trifles. Take this for example. Lane once again plays a depressed divorcee (as she did in Tuscan Sun) whose husband left her and married a younger woman, being pushed by her family which is made up of mostly losers (except for her swinging widowed father played by Christopher Plummer) into going back into the dating scene again by the fact that they have placed her profile on an online dating site without her consent. This leads to not one, but two montages of “failed first dates” with a continuing stream of utter losers (one guy can’t help but cry all the time, another comments on how he had hoped she was 18), while in contrast we follow John Cusack as a whimsical boat builder (with an unhealthy obsession with Dr. Zhivago) who is also reeling from his recent divorce (no points awarded if you guess that the two will meet up). The problem, as with so many PG-13 romantic comedies, is that the dialogue is just plain AWFUL, with people talking in clever witticisms that no one would actually say in real life, and once it’s established that Lane and Cusack are “made for each other”, it’s just a matter of trying to keep oneself from falling asleep until the big finish. Things are complicated by the fact that Lane works as a preschool teacher (complete with gay co-worker) and has a flirtation and near romance with the divorced father of one of her students (Dermot “Dirty Steve” Mulroney). However, Mulroney is such a smarmy fake with his sensitive act and confident sneer that we find ourselves surprised that there would be any attraction at all. There are some gems though, mostly with certain performances: Plummer continues to show why he’s one of the coolest old guy actors ever, deftly meeting women and bringing not one but three dates to family gatherings; Stockard Channing as his trailer park lady friend has a funny scene when one of her online boyfriends turns out to be a 15-year-old boy; Julie Gonzalo is super-hot and sexy as Lane’s co-worker (after prancing around in a sexy cowgirl outfit, she wonders aloud why “all the dads are sticking around for the Halloween party”); Ben Shenkman gets some good dry humor out of his role as Cusack’s best friend; and Jordano Spiro gets some laughs as a failed bimbo date of Cusack’s who doesn’t understand Zhivago (“They were Communist, right?”). On the other hand, Elizabeth Perkins, so hot in the 80s, has not aged too gracefully as Lane’s sister, and the rest of her family are supposed to be funny but instead are boring cardboard cutouts. Finally the film commits the one biggest sin of all rom-coms: Having several of the characters break out into a “spontaneous” musical number after the Partridge Family comes up in conversation (and after Mulroney was in the exact same type of scene in My Best Friend’s Wedding, it’s especially degrading). This takes the viewer out of the film for a good while, and it never recovers. In the end, one should just see this film for Diane Lane, who would probably be appealing and watchable just reading out of the phonebook…
5/10