Sweet Home Alabama (2002)
Directed by Andy Tennant
Written by C Jay Cox
Starring Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas, Patrick Dempsey, Candace Bergen, Fred Ward, Jean Smart
Release Date September 27th, 2002
Published September 24th, 2002
In Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon showed herself to be the romantic comedy heiress apparent to Julia Roberts. With her perky good looks and sugary sweetness offset by a wonderfully mischievous smile it was impossible not to fall in love with her. Witherspoon brings those same qualities to her latest film, Sweet Home Alabama, but under the direction of Andy Tennent the same qualities that made you love her in Legally Blonde make you loathe her in this dense retread of every romantic comedy ever made.
In Alabama Reese has one of those great Hollywood lives where everything is perfect: perfect job, perfect friends, perfect man, just perfect. As Melanie Carmichael, Reese is a New York fashion designer about to marry the son of New York’s Mayor. Patrick Dempsey plays the perfect guy, Andrew, just going through the motions playing the same role Bill Pullman played in Sleepless in Seattle. No matter how good a guy he is, the trailer has already explained his fate.
After Andrew asks Melanie to marry him, Melanie has to go home to Alabama to take care of the small detail of her current husband Jake (Josh Lucas). In flashback we are treated to the scene when Jake and Melanie fell in love, they were struck by lightning as the shared their first kiss. Watching this scene my eyes rolled so far back I could see the dull faces of the people directly behind me. You can say I’m cynical but haven’t we seen this exact seen or something very similar at least a thousand times? Melanie and Jake’s bad sitcom style arguing is just one of a million tip offs that they will back together at the end of the film.
Having returned to her home town for the first time in 7 years Melanie takes time to revisit her old friends including Bobby Ray (Ethan Embry) who has a secret only Melanie knows about, the kind of secret that stereotypical southerners don’t react well to. There is also Melanie’s former best friend Lurlynn (Melanie Lynskie) who now has three kids including a newborn she takes to the bar as so many southerners are prone to do. Let us not forget Melanie’s parents Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place, who don’t so much fit into the role of stereotypical Southern parents that everyone in the audience assumed they would be.
So golly, do you think Melanie’s unusual southern friends and family will clash with her high class New York would be in laws?
Poor Candace Bergen, this wonderfully talented Emmy winning actress is stuck with the film's most thankless role. As the ever scowling and disapproving mother-in-law, Bergen is never allowed to smile, never allowed to joke. The purpose of Bergen’s Mayor of New York and mother of the groom is to be the bitch so at the end of the movie she can get her comeuppance in what is supposed to make the audience cheer.
That is the essence of the problem with Sweet Home Alabama, every scene has been filmed with the purpose of exerting a particular response from the audience. It is as if every scene in the film was individually test screened by demographic to make sure it illicited the correct audience response.
Like a romantic comedy machine, Sweet Home Alabama grinds through it’s mechanical plot, perfectly calibrated to meet exactly what the audience expects. The film is so predictable even lines of dialogue can be anticipated. Scenes are setup ten to twenty minutes ahead so, rather than watch the movie, I was sitting and waiting for the expected payoff and like clockwork I didn’t have to wait long for it in exactly the way I expected.
Sweet Home Alabama is the latest film to exhibit my biggest movie pet peeve. A film based on seemingly intelligent characters making intensely dumb decisions because if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a movie. Not a frame of film goes by that Melanie doesn’t have an opportunity to solve all her problems with one intelligent decision. One line of intelligent dialogue and problem solved, movie over.
Sweet Home Alabama is an awful film and I had very low expectations for this film. I expected to laugh a couple times, fall in love with Reese Witherspoon again and leave the theater with a smile on my face. Instead I walked out depressed after seeing a film that illustrates everything that is wrong modern Hollywood film-making. This is yet another film that had a poster before it had a screenplay. A film where marketing execs made the creative decisions and hired creative people to carry out the vision of the publicity department. Director Andy Tennent was likely instructed to simply make Reese look cute and hope that the writers might squeeze in a sight gag or one liner somewhere, spoiler alert: they didn’t.
To steal a line from my hero Roger Ebert I hated, hated, hated this movie. This film does not improve upon the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. I still love Reese Witherspoon, but only because I watched Legally Blonde. Had I not, I might curse her for having made this film. Hollywood has no shame churning out the same drivel month after month. And I know what you're saying and yes I shouldn’t act so surprised but I honestly believe that there is art out there somewhere, Sweet Home Alabama dims that hope slightly but that dream is still there.
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