1-14-10 Movie Review: Leap Year

Two noncommercials over the coming week, both unfortunately tomorrow night. At 6:30, the Laurel and Hardy fan club will show the Boys in the long British version of A Chump at Oxford, plus, in honor of Hardy's 118th birthday, two shorts featuring him before he teamed up with Laurel, "Stick Around" with Bobbie Ray and "Isn't Life Terrible?" with Charlie Chase, and finally the cartoon "Mother Goose Goes Hollywood", in which Laurel and Hardy are represented. This special meeting of the Laurel and Hardy fan club is 6:30 Friday in the Calvary Methodist Church, 2525 North Rock Road.

And unfortunately, competing with this, is Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Film and Video Companion of 2004, starring a nineteen-year-old Catherine Deneuve in a simple love story of a common shop girl and a soldier, told entirely in picture and song. Umbrellas of Cherbourg shows at 7:30 Friday in the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway.

And commercially, we have Leap Year.

Leap Year has Amy Adams on screen about 90% of the time, and that alone is enough to satisfy me, so I'm maybe not the best one to review any Amy Adams movie. But Leap Year doesn't give her the chances to shine that Julie and Julia or Doubt did; in fact, it doesn't give her a lot to work with at all. It's the age-old story of a couple of incompatibles who are forced into traveling together and, inevitably in a Hollywood movie, find love: the most memorable example is Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, and among the most notable recent variables were Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpie in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Leap Year isn't in the class with any of those, but it is a pleasant evening with likable characters in a leisurely story among colorful locations and eccentric support players, with nothing to offend: it's even unusually careful with the theme of chastity, though not as careful as Gable and Colbert had to be.

It is a little unkind to Wales, which comes across as a very primitive place inhabited by very superstitious people; Ireland, as one might expect in a Hollywood movie, is a good deal more attractive. Among the few examples of wretched excess is a suggestion of suicide that is included, perhaps, to excuse the use of a beautiful and dramatic setting but that is out of touch with both characterization and general tone. Other excesses involve the trashing of a hotel room that is surely intended to be funnier that it is. and maybe too much damage to a car.

But generally, Leap Year, despite a pretty silly beginning situation, maintains an easy, amiable, realistic tone, without much effort to arouse emotions or even laughter; that's way it's so relaxing. Antagonism between Adams and costar Matthew Goode is never violent; Goode is too chivalrous to be impatient with a very attractive woman who obviously is not able to handle her situation, and Adams is in a foreign land she knows she can't understand, and both are basically good-natured and attracted to each other, whether willing to admit it or not.

The ending of Leap Year, as is all too common with this genre, is weak and sentimental. The whole thing is pretty hard to believe. But relax and turn off your brain, and you'll wish you could live in a world like this.