Bama Bummer
Sweet Home Alabama leaves sour aftertaste
Sweet Home Alabama cements Reese Witherspoon’s elevation to Hollywood’s A-list. Thanks to her star-making success with last summer’s Legally Blonde, Witherspoon now gets to carry the kind of lousy wedding comedy that Julia Roberts would reject outright.
The film means to offer a comedic culture clash between New York and L.A. (Lower Alabama), with Witherspoon torn between beaus from both. The actress’s unforced appeal buoy her above the movie’s cloddish embrace of cliche, but you get a more accurate depiction of the South in that movie about the Country Bears.
We meet Witherspoon’s character, up-and-coming designer Melanie Carmichael, on the eve of astonishing success. On the night of her breakthrough fashion show, her aristocratic fiance Andrew (Patrick Dempsey) pops the question — by renting out Tiffany’s and saying, “Pick one.”
However, Melanie’s happiness is tarred by a shameful secret: She’s not really chic Melanie Carmichael from the elegant Alabama town of Greenville, but hell-raisin’ “Felony Melanie” Smooter from Pigeon Creek, from the wrong side of the tracks. On leaving home to pursue success in the Big Apple, she invented a new history to conceal her white-trash background, which includes being hitched to childhood sweetheart Jake (Josh Lucas). And her husband has never signed divorce papers despite their seven-year separation.
We learn this in scenes of desperately hurried exposition after Melanie grudgingly returns home to end her first marriage. Although good ol’ Jake incessantly needles her, he won’t go along with the divorce, setting off bantering exchanges like “Fine!” “Fine!” We’re meant to think that Jake still carries a torch for her, but Lucas proves terribly limited as a romantic comedy lead, conveying his every emotion with the same tight grin, whether he’s angry, happy, self-pitying, etc.
While Melanie tries to coerce the divorce, she has a series of embarrassing homecomings with her rustic parents Earl and Pearl (Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place) and old friends, who remind her of her uncouth youth. Meanwhile, her fiance’s mother (Candice Bergen) complicates things further: As the scandal-sensitive mayor of New York City, she wants to get to the bottom of Melanie’s mysterious background. Bergen plays the role like a life-sized Martha Stewart display carved of brittle plywood.
Pigeon Creek is apparently the nexus of Southern stereotypes. Earl and his buds are avid Civil War re-enactors, with Confederate flag throw pillows and Robert E. Lee portraits in their living rooms. Melanie’s visit coincides with the town Catfish Festival, and the place even has its own Coon Dog Cemetery.
The problem with Sweet Home Alabama is not that catfish festivals and coon dog cemeteries don’t exist, or that there’s anything innately wrong with them. It’s that the film defines the South with the most lazy, one-dimensional shorthand possible, having no appreciation of the regional subtleties that make an effort like Cookie’s Fortune ring true. It’s as if it made the assertion that all powerful career women are conniving castrators like Bergen’s mayor.
The film makes a visual joke of Melanie rushing down Pigeon Creek’s sleepy Main Street, chattering on her cell phone like it’s a Fifth Avenue lunch hour. Director Andy Tennant could have made an amusing incongruity of the scene, but the townsfolk gawk at her like they’ve never seen a phone without a crank on it before. At least supporting players like Fred Ward and Jean Smart (as Jake’s roadhouse mother) bring moments of gentle dignity to a script that has none. And Sweet Home Alabama gives decent screen time to some local actors, notably Jen Apgar as a honky-tonk honey and Ted Manson as a beaming coot who likes to blow up anvils.
Sweet Home Alabama follows all the wheezy rituals of nuptial comedies, like the way problems can’t be resolved until the bride has already started down the aisle. In this film’s shotgun wedding of cartoon rednecks and cookie-cutter romance, it’s the innocent audience that gets jilted.