Not Coming to a Theater Near You

No Reservations / USA / 2007

Being a captive audience on a decidedly old-fashioned Continental plane that lacked individual television monitors is still really no excuse for sitting through this Catherine Zeta-Jones/Aaron Eckhart (?!) rom-com in its entirety, but I ‘fess up to it nonetheless. And I am not ashamed, nor disappointed — actually I was quite looking forward to seeing this when I saw it advertised over the summer.

For god’s sake, why?, you may quite understandably ask.

And to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s my fascination with Catherine Zeta-Jones, a woman who, once so saucy in the Banderas Zorro movie, became instantly sexless the second she married Michael Douglas. Since that moment, or perhaps long before, Zeta-Jones has made one disastrous role-choice after another, but apparently nets about $3 million for each year she remains married to Douglas, with a nice bonus if ever (or is it “whenever”) he cheats on her. Such a fascinating career/private-life confirms that she is first and foremost a moviestar, so any acting she might occasionally do is totally beside the point. And that this moviestardom relies heavily on the notion, however accurate or inaccurate, that she is a cold, calculating, mercenary bitch means that she is ideally suited to the role of an emotionally detached, careerist chef in New York who cannot relinquish her sense of self-possession to her poor, motherless niece (little orphan Abigail Breslin), let alone to any man (except Aaron Eckhart, naturally). This is also the reason that her role in Intolerable Cruelty is far and away her best work.

Or maybe it’s the mixture of vanity and curiosity that stems from my mother’s assertion (post-Possession, no less) that I look like Aaron Eckhart. It will only dishearten my poor mother to know that Eckhart here looks a good deal sleazier than he did even in In the Company of Men.

Anyway, it’s an utterly paint-by-numbers film, which is to say that all of its parts work perfectly to create the desired effect: a low-level emotional satisfaction that ensues from seeing a frigid woman coaxed into the role of mother-wife where she belongs. Of course I cried — who wouldn’t?

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: In-flight movie
11 Dec 2007 1:04 PM | Submit Comment