Get lost, darling

10 April 2012

There's a kind of anger that flooded up in me the minute this "romantic comedy" opened. There's Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson), feature writer on Composure, a women's mag for the water-cooler crowd, trying to author a reader-gripping article entitled "How to bring peace to Tajikistan".

Not the film's fault that it comes out just as coalition forces try to bring peace to Iraq. But it is symptomatic of how wrapped up the characters are in themselves that the only glance thrown at the real world happens to be this slighting gag.

More and more these days, I am irritated by the number of American movies that simply don't acknowledge that there's a planet out there, somewhere beyond the US. I wonder if the generalised anger currently being demonstrated against the White House will eventually get round to the Hollywood products in the movie houses: that might be healthier.

The title of this product - replete with all the productplacements for luxury goods and services that can be fitted into its high-maintenance consumer scene - tells you all you need to know about it: there's not much more I can add, or wish to.

Andie's editor on Composure is played by Bebe Neuwirth. She is a sort of Anna Wintourish ice queen, and is the best thing in

the film. She makes the staff remove their shoes at editorial conferences and take a deep breath of collective inspiration.

She vetoes the Tajikistan idea, so Andie comes up with a substitute piece on bad dating habits. She proposes to hook a handsome guy then make him so mad that he'll dump her inside 10 days.

Unknown to her, across town, Benjamin Barty (Matthew McConaughey), an ad man whose daily change of shirt in his office makes the girls swoon at the sight of his pecs, wangles a lush new jewellery account from his boss by betting he can make a dame fall for him inside 10 days. Benjamin, meet Andie ... there have been worse ideas than this.

The old Doris Day-Rock Hudson sex-comedies of the Fifties produced the same sort of adversarial one-upping that turns into true love only after gender hostilities have subsided with a winwin verdict.

Yet there is something very distasteful in the new and updated - but not improved - version. It is a comedy of bad faith, rather than good humour.

This comes hardest on Hudson, since Andie is a closet bitch under the working-girl act. Political correctness dictates that she must emasculate her man at every point in the foreplay.

Benjamin, instead of the complacent hunk whom Rock Hudson often finessed, is a spineless wimp who accepts humiliation like a born masochist. And both of them have underhand commercial motives at heart. Andie's siege tactics would make any male worm turn long before her chosen one starts ineffectually wriggling.

She sends him off for a Coke just as the Knicks are about to score; turns down his cordon bleu cooking by pretending she is a vegan; dolls him up in plaid checks to match her miniature dog's streetcoat; gatecrashes his poker game; strews his bachelor pad with fluffy toys and stacks her cosmetics in his bathroom; and finally nicknames his penis "Princess Sophia", where he'd much prefer it to be called "Spike" or "Butch".

She plays the ninny and the harpy, the baby doll and the ball breaker. It's Kate Hudson's film all right, but this actress is a cold squeeze, not well photographed either, and has the worst hairdo on the East Side.

When she comes over all severe, and you fear that McConaughey is going to take a caning from her dominatrix, she looks like some hard-faced bully. But the comedy is tilted her way because that is where the target audience of flick-chicks is found.

I didn't notice much romancing on Benjamin's part, except for the 100 white roses he sends her in the opening bouts.

Any guy who only thinks of romance in terms of the rosaceae species is not just a goner, but a by-goner. This is the actor whom Graydon Carter dubbed "The new Paul Newman" in Vanity Fair a couple of aeons ago - I think not.

There's an awful scene, so drawn out by director Donald Petrie, when the two of them visit his working-class parents and join in a card game where anyone fibbing over their hand has "Bullshit" bellowed at them.

This film invites that sort of response. The best things in it are the incidentals. The " threeminute dating" routine when the two meet, consisting of one-word exchanges rising to climax ("Hungry?" - "Starving" - "Leave?" - "Now?" - "Yes" - "Great"), is fine.

I wish the rest of the clunky dialogue were as economical. And I wish I'd been as keen-eyed as my colleague Alan Frank, an ex-medical student, who tells me that among the "beauty products" stashed by Andie beside her man's toilet articles is a tube of proprietary ointment commonly prescribed for a vaginal infection.