Reese Witherspoon is a likable actress, but she doesn't have the Julia-level wattage to keep us interested in Melanie even when she's way past the point of acting nicely.
(He even gets to exhibit a flair for keeping up appearances when the dizzy, straight heroine has trapped herself in her own false pretenses.) My Best Friend's Wedding was one of recent years' most rousing marital comedies, partly because it had enough flesh under its nails that it wasn't precisely a romantic comedy, and so you can't fault Sweet Home's creators in their choice of template.īut a funny thing happened on the way to the honkytonk. Patrick Dempsey exists in the Cameron Diaz part of the surprisingly sympathetic rival-heir, and midfilm revelations about Embry's character confirm that the ghost of Rupert Everett hasn't been banished altogether. Substitute Reese's fashion designer for Julia's food criticboth modish, epicurean, vaguely haughty vocations designed to introduce a lady to all the most glamorous people, mostly get what she wants, and still call it "work." Josh Lucas is an even dreamier and more relaxed emblem of male hunkdom than Dermot Mulroney, and to boot is well-coordinated to Reese's light complexion, like a really great accessory. If all of this seems redolent of My Best Friend's Wedding, the twinship cannot be accidental. This is not a leave-a-forwarding address kind of girl. After Andrew proposes marriage in a gaga and surreptitiously tawdry sequence in Tiffany's (from the get go, the wedding ring symbolizes something Melanie gets to choose, not something she feels or welcomes), she hikes back to Alabama to "clear up some issues from her past"by herself, for an indefinite period, with no specifics provided.
That's all way before the movie begins, but then again it isn't, because the proper plot commences with a virtual duplication of the same gesture, just geographically reversed. And so she leaves not just Jake, her teenaged husband, but her parents (Mary Kay Place and Fred Ward), her friends (including Ethan Embry andshe's back! Heavenly Creatures' Melanie Lynskey), and all of her acquaintances in Pigeon Creek, Alabama, without a word. She is skittish about promises and responsibility, and she seems immediately suspicious of happinessto include the happiness of others, which she often works by reflex to dismantle. That fault is named Melanie, and Sweet Home Alabama makes clear early on that she has no one but herself to blame for her conundrums. They are for the most part, albeit in their own ways, graceful to a fault. By contrast, Sweet Home Alabama refreshingly allows both Andrew and Jake to be reasonably charming, sincere, and well-intentioned, and in fact, when one or the other slips into recognizably human lapses of compassion or judgment, they swiftly recoup these errors and avoid being branded Permanently Unfit. Right, it's just a thank-goodness escape from legions of obvious Mr.
The eventual union in "romances" like these isn't with Mr.
It is all too often that Hollywood movies about amorous "choice" seal the deal by disqualifying one of the contendersor even, as Kissing Jessica Stein reminds us, by pre-empting an entire gender (not because they're men, but because they sneeze, wear silk, use calculators). In telling the would-be larkish story of fashion designer Melanie Carmichael (Reese Witherspoon) and her competing romantic commitments to Andrew Hennings (Patrick Dempsey), the upscale, dashing son of the mayor of New York City, and Jake Perry (Josh Lucas), the hardy, dashing quarterback sweetheart she abandoned in a tearful huff seven years ago, Sweet Home Alabama refuses to make either fellow a jerk, a bully, a viper, or a control freak. Sweet Home Alabama can't make choices, which is sometimes a good thing, but more often isn't.
Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas, Patrick Dempsey, Ethan Embry, Candice Bergin, Mary Kay Place, Fred Ward, Jean Smart, Melanie Lynskey, Dakota Fanning, Nathan Lee Graham. “I love Sweet Home Alabama!” the Morning Show star said during a Facebook Live chat in August 2016.Director: Andy Tennant. Witherspoon, 45, for her part, has also discussed her interest in a sequel. And that they’ve had it since they were little kids.” Even when they’re apart, there’s something connected about the two of them. Kind of to realize what he’s lost again and that the kids even, that their lives have separated in some ways, and I think that’s sort of the magic of that story is that there’s an eternal love there,” he noted. “I kind of love the idea that they have actually divorced and been divorced for a while and he wants her back. Worst Movie Sequels of All Time Read articleĮven though Lucas thought the main relationship wouldn’t stay together, he did think they could make it work somehow.