Movie Review: New In Town

The only noncommercial movie I have to announce is the next in a Japanese series at the Blank Page Gallery, The Ballad of Narayama from 1983, about brutal life in old-time Japan, with old people abandoned in the mountains to die and criminals buried alive. That's Tuesday at 7:30 in the Blank Page Gallery, 917 West Douglas. And commercially, I don't know what to say about New in Town. The three women I discussed it with gave it two raves and a highly favorable, but it didn't reach me. It's the first Renee Zellweger movie in which she didn't win me over. I don't think she's the problem, though. Her walk is so stiff legged that despite the women telling me it results from wearing high heels, to me it suggested extreme repression or maybe constipation. But her other inadequacies were obviously supposed to result from her being a Miami executive transferred to take over a food processing plant in New Ulm, Minnesota, a town of about 14,000 people and no sun. My native state can be cold and inhospitable as to climate, but that didn't bother me in Fargo. But I must share what a Minneapolis friend told me were new Ulm's objections to its portrayal in New in Town. It is axiomatic in theatre that comedy requires bright light, and New in Town is lit like a heavy drama, even indoors. I suspect that New Ulm has adequate lighting in houses and offices even if it lacks the enormous windows, glaring sunlight, and sun-soaked beaches shown in Miami. And I suspect that New Ulm has thermostats that can be set up to where people do not have to wear sweaters and scarves in their houses and sleep under such mountains of blankets that it is hard to get up in the mornings. A corporate executive could afford comfortable housing. Little of this indoor cold or darkness is used for comic effect, though cold is sometimes used effectively. Outdoors, I have never seen visible breath used so realistically, though again, not usually to comic effect. But a comedy could certainly use some kind of snowy beauty at least occasionally. New in Town dissolves the horizon line in foggy snow and snowy ground with no sun visible. New in Town is a warm hearted comedy about simple rural people winning over the super-sophisticates of the cities. It deserves a setting that is at least not forbidding because it has the characters and an old fashioned story line suitable for the job. Unfortunately, the central love story is raggedly handled. Zellweger has too few scenes with Harry Connick, Jr., and Connick is too abruptly rude on first acquaintance and warms to her too abruptly and when she is unconscious. But Siobhan Fallon Hogan as the snoopy secretary ? the Minnesotans are too democratic to understand keeping secrets ? and J.K. Simmons, the plant manager who doesn't let business relations poison his social feelings, have exactly the right touch, and my bet is that others would have had, too, if I hadn't had to strain to understand the dialect, as I always have to with dialect, even that of my native Minnesota. The New Ulmers are so accepting of different social types and classes that it wouldn't occur to them that one does not invite a corporate executive to a home dinner of meat loaf, and they quickly accept new styles teenagers have picked up off television. They aren't much for bearing grudges, and they listen to people they disagree with. And simple as they may seem, they have an ability to adapt to new situations and accept new ideas that I wish were illustrated more than just described in a key speech Zellweger gives to corporate management ? which, now I think of it, itself is more reasonable than I expected. New in Town is a movie that likes people and wants us to. I wish I could like it as much as the three ladies did. Jim Erickson has been KMUW's film reviewer since 1974. Jim taught Narrative in Literature and Film at WSU from 1966 until his retirement in 1997. Jim's favorite film is Citizen Kane.