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Alex & Emma
review by Elias
Savada, 20 June 2003
As if the
thirty inches of rain that has drenched the Washington, D.C., area
this year hasn't been depressing enough, the new romantic comedy Alex
& Emma drowns any iota of movie-magic romance and uncovers a
drought of comic talent. For a film about a writer and the creative
process, it's an inspired wreck from actor-turned-producer/director
Rob Reiner, who first and last used a story within a story concept
immensely more successfully in the beloved fantasy The Princess
Bride. And it's not as if the Bronx-born Reiner can't handle the
genre, because he's succeeded with The
Sure Thing, The American President, and one of the best of them all, When
Harry Met Sally. He stumbled badly in 1999 with the somber,
deconstructive The Story of Us,
just to wait four more years to brings us this poppycock. My, but
the times they are a-changing, for the worse. Please Rob, make this
just another hiccup. Yes, we also regret North,
but your directorial career still places you today at a very
respectable 6.895 on the IMDB.com rating scale. Heck, if every
Californian voted the same way as viewers of your movies, you could
even run for governor! (Is that why there are so many presidential
jokes in your film?)
So, what's wrong
with Alex & Emma aside
from its general loveless feel and unfunny core? It feels forced and
overwrought, particularly with nearly non-stop voiceover narration
by star Luke Wilson, who plays a stressed-out, Boston-based novelist
caught between some menacing Cuban loan sharks and a huge case of
writer's block. As Alex Sheldon, he sporadically, then frantically,
sputters up over the course of a month his next book, for which his
ever-confident publisher (Rob Reiner) has promised him enough money,
but only when the manuscript is delivered. It's not likely to
surprise any viewer that the author will obviously pay off his debt,
save his own life, and eventually win the girl. Getting there should
be a whole lot more charming than watching this brick of a movie
inch its way through a tiring 100 minutes.
Loosely based on
an incident behind Fyodor Dostoevsky's compulsive study The
Gambler (in which a gambling-addicted writer must write a book
in thirty days to clear a debt, hires a stenographer, and ultimately
falls in love with her), the script by Jeremy Leven (The
Legend of Bagger Vance) zigzags between present-day Bean Town
and an imaginary island (discovered by real life 16th-century
explorer Jacques Cartier—there's a joke in there somewhere) off
the coast of Maine back in the golden-drenched summer of 1924. Emma
Dinsmore (Kate Hudson), is a level-headed, but romantically
uninvolved stenographer who temps for law firms and somehow finds
herself romantically bamboozled by Alex to spend four-plus weeks
with him, mostly on a dare and certainly without any cash,
converting the tiresome dictation into a boring love story. It's
what every attractive, single woman dreams of, isn't it?
Emma, ever the
opinionated modern muse, prefers to read the last page of any book
first, just like Jack Nicholson's Warren Schmidt. But screenwriter
Leven, instead of building on that obsession, wherein the film might
have succeeded if he used some Memento-style
backwards-forwards stylings, instead just lumps some modern day
romantic perceptions in a 1920s setting. Emma thus is enmeshed in
Alex's semi-inspired literate/real world journey on his road to
commitment, taking the shorthand and embodying the role of a mildly
implausible and constantly re-written au pair in the pre-Depression
world of Adam Shipley, Alex's sappy alter ego/protagonist. The only
chuckle I got out of the film was Hudson's transformation from the
Swedish Ylva to the red-hot German Elsa, then a Spanish Eldora, and
finally the "emancipate me!" Philadelphian Anna. These
women all cater to the children of Polina Delacroix (Sophie
Marceau), a French divorcée in a financial crunch, yet game to
entice the talented Mr. Shipley, hired on as the children's English
tutor. David Paymer has a nonplussed role as a wealthy paramour
intent on marrying the "ample bosomed" (another flatliner)
Polina.
Frankly I can't
see the honest love interest through the trees. It's all just so
casual, without a real spark and laden with age old clichés that
are supposedly to elicit laughter. Alex & Emma is a pretty soggy affair. Emma accidentally drops
eighteen pages of Alex's novel on a rain-drenched street one night.
I wish I could have dumped the entire movie the same way. Lord knows
the weather has been favorably inclined to help.
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