Southern hospitality

The trouble with looking (and probably being) the most intelligent of the youngish star pack is that there are so few parts available to match your IQ. Reese Witherspoon is the best thing in Sweet Home Alabama. But she's too good for a sappy sitcom set mainly in a hillbilly community that looks as if it is still in an unreconstructed comic-strip about the Deep South.

She starts the film in what looks like her natural habitat. She's Melanie Carmichael, New York's cutting-edge fashion designer, who's being courted by Andrew, the John Kennedy-like son (Patrick Dempsey) of the city's Hillary Clintonesque woman mayor (Candice Bergen).

He's Irish-American, romantic and has a bank balance that lets him pack her SoHo apartment with a nursery of roses - "one for every moment I thought of you". In case a thousand perfect roses don't make a statement, he has Tiffany's open up, fully staffed, after dark - all for her to choose the ring. "Pick one," he murmurs, as the staff offer her the shop. Audrey Hepburn never struck it so rich.

These scenes have a metropolitan polish that Reese Witherspoon displays to perfection. I was enjoying the ridiculous burlesque of her fiance's romantic patronage and his mother's political resistance when, suddenly, Witherspoon turned into a girl with the real name of Melanie Smooter, from Pigeon Creek, in backwoods Alabama. The hautecouture comedy simultaneously collapsed into homespun farce.

Seems Melanie married her sweetheart, Jake (Josh Lucas), way back in high school days and has been keeping it a secret from the Manhattan set. And quite properly, too, when you lay eyes on the unhygienic Jake and his basset hound dawg, both of whom look as if a tub of hot water and a razor (for him) are becoming a dire necessity.

All these years Jake's been refusing his wife a divorce. So, before she feels the Tiffany baubles are safely hers, she's got to get him to sign on the lawyer's dotted line. It takes longer to do this than to say it: much too long.

The notion that small-town America is inherently more down-to-earth, honest and virtuous than the big city's black-tie crowd is scarcely a fresh one. And the way Andy Tennant's direction puts the message up in capital letters, illuminated in neon, as clearly as the sign that says "No Dancing on the Tables in Spurs" at Pigeon Creek's neighbourhood watering hole, doesn't make it any less formulaic.

I cringed as Witherspoon gradually chucks off her off-the-shoulder designer wear, puts on honest blue jeans and cowboy boots and settles in with a mom and dad whom the late Al Capp might have plucked straight from his cartoonist's Dogpatch community. She can still hold her own with her unkempt and uncouth mate the way her archetypal forerunner Katharine Hepburn used to do with an uppity man like Humphrey Bogart, but the overlaying culture clash between North and South is shouted through a megaphone.

After trying to persuade Jake to sign the bill of divorcement with her Mont Blanc pen by making herself a nuisance around the shack, emptying their joint bank account and calling his poolroom buddies' masculinity into question, Melanie begins to discover a virtue in every inhabitant, repents of trying to blow up the local bank in a school prank, makes her peace with a family pet in the Coon Dog Cemetery and satisfies the populist impulse of this kind of comedy which says that you can take the girl out of the South, but not the South out of ... but you know the rest.

Occasionally you get a subtlety that's escaped the cutting room floor. Dempsey in his bespoke suit and Vanity Fair hair-style arrives in town on his fiance's trail and gets taken for the local gay's boyfriend. So much for New York.