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| Witherspoon makes Sweet Home Alabama Fly |
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 | | | Reese Witherspoon stars in Sweet Home Alabama |
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By David Richards
Grade: B
At 10 years old, a young southern girl once strapped a set of dynamite to a cat, attached a long, long fuse to it, then lit it before the cat ran into a bank and the bank blew up.
The girl, nicknamed felony Melanie, was never charged, but she has since run away from that and a bunch of other things, away from her Alabama past and created a new life for herself in New York _ a pretty good one, too.
Melanie Carmichael (Reese Witherspoon) is now one of the hottest new fashion designers in the country and one who has just gotten engaged to the mayor's son Andrew (Patrick Dempsey), a future presidential hopeful.
Andrew seems like quite a catch for Melanie.
He spoils her with more roses in a day than most people get in a lifetime, but Melanie's past is about to catch up with her.
When she left her home seven years ago, she was in too much of a hurry and has never finalized her divorce with her husband Jake (Josh Lucas), a man who prefers wearing flannel shirts and drinking high-calorie beer over three-piece suits and martinis.
Although Melanie returns to her home seeking only a signature from Jake on the divorce papers, she ends up finding a whole lot more.
Her old stomping ground, for instance, is a far cry from the New York surroundings she has been used to the past few years and it's not all bad.
It's the type of place where the locals climb up on water towers and toss beer bottles down into the garbage cans waiting below.
It isn't long before Melanie gets comfortable again with her surroundings and will eventually have to chose between her big-city rich guy or the small-town local boy.
Since most of the film takes place in Alabama, we are introduced to a few colorful characters, each of whom have their own opinions about who Melanie should choose.
There's her mother (Mary Kay Place), who makes the best jam in three counties, and her father (Fred Ward), a soldier in Civil War re-enactments, who tells her, "You can't ride two horses with one ass, sugarbean."
Rounding out the cast is Melanie's old best-guy friend Bobby Ray (Ethan Embry), who delivers some of the film's best lines.
Sweet Home Alabama is funny and entertaining_your typical date-movie and romantic comedy. Nothing great happens that we haven't seen before, but nothing terrible happens, either.
Witherspoon steals the show by far, and if it wasn't for her, the film would probably be simply mediocre.
If there is a low point, however, it's the ending. It's a cop-out and the way Melanie treats the guy she doesn't choose is mean and unnecessary. She should have told him how she felt in private, instead of in front of a big crowd the way she does.
Neither of these two guys does anything wrong, so in a greater film, both should get the respect they deserve from Melanie, even if she truly only loves one of them.
****Sweet Home Alabama is rated PG-13 for some language and some sexual references. |
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