BEFORE: Back to Jennifer Aniston for this one, something of a last-minute substitution.
THE PLOT: A discount store clerk strikes up an affair with a stock boy who considers himself the incarnation of Holden Caulfield.
AFTER: This felt like a film that would have done well at Sundance (just checked - sure enough, it premiered there in January 2002) because it's just a little bleak, a little edgy, with a couple of off-center stars. Not including Aniston, of course, but she still had only been in a handful of films before this one, like "Leprechaun" and "Office Space". Oh, and a couple of romantic-based films like "She's the One" and "Picture Perfect" - of course, now she's like the queen of rom-coms, starring in 2 or 3 a year, but mostly films I'm trying to avoid adding to the list.
At heart, this is a pretty basic film about an unsatisfied woman who has an affair with a co-worker, and for the most part it proceeds pretty logically - at least we get a WHY for how the affair starts. I'm torn, however, over whether this was set up as some kind of morality play, or it's just meant to be a slice-of-life look at the staff of a discount store somewhere in the South.
Events spiral out of control from there, but it's in a fashion that mostly makes sense, right up until the ending. Once again, it feels like a screenwriter set up the situation, and then wrote himself into a corner, with no exit for the story. So things got wrapped up, but a little too quickly, and a little too neatly for my taste.
Also starring John C. Reilly (last seen in "Chicago", playing essentially the same character, the cheated-on husband), Jake Gyllenhaal, Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "The Incredible Hulk"), Zooey Deschanel (last seen in "Yes Man"), John Carroll Lynch (last seen in "Face/Off"), and Deborah Rush (last seen in "Bad Company")
RATING: 6 out of 10 nametags
No comments:
Post a Comment