Movies
In Her Shoes
Curtis Hanson's handling of the Jennifer Weiner book, lightly, mildly, breezily entertaining in a second-rate, best-sellerish, chick-lit kind of way: the seriocomic story of two mismatched Jewish sisters, one an overweight, high-achieving Philadelphia lawyer whose private life consists of romance novels and a shoe fetish, and the other a rootless mooching dyslexic sexpot. (Or, in their traded insults, a "fat pig" and "pretty but real stupid.") After they have a major falling-out and a parting-of-the-ways, the first finds love with a too-good-to-be-true emasculated dreamboat (albeit a 76ers fan), and the second finds self-worth shopping for the old ladies in a Florida retirement community and reading poetry to a blind professor, while conquering her dyslexia, at the Assisted Living Center. And they then find their way back to each other. Yay, team. The scene of a man and a woman reading aloud from a romance novel as sexual foreplay is good for a laugh; and the sight of a Bikini Babe around the old folks' swimming pool is good for a few; and Shirley MacLaine, as the long-lost grandmother, can still handle a line and a look. The casting of Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz as the sisters, on the other hand, is somewhat hard to swallow. Forget, if you can, their ostensible Jewishness and their supposed sisterhood. Collette, though she's reported to have packed on twenty-five pounds for the part, still looks well under the national norm and nowhere near her Muriel's Wedding weight. And Diaz, though she wears her clothes well, especially the eensy-weensy ones, fails to reveal any depths beneath. Even she can't quite botch the lump-in-the-throat recitation of E.E. Cummings at the wedding, but she's more in her element when she gets to kick up her heels afterwards. 2005.
Reader Rating:
MPAA Rating: PG-13
