New In Town
Hopelessly misconceived and poorly executed, New In Town is a tiresome fish out of water comedy reminiscent of Sweet Home Alabama that careens awkwardly from slapstick to heartbreak via tedium and incredulity.
Hopelessly misconceived and poorly executed, New In Town is a tiresome fish out of water comedy reminiscent of Sweet Home Alabama that careens awkwardly from slapstick to heartbreak via tedium and incredulity.
Screenwriters Kenneth Rance and C Jay Cox set the majority of the film in the tiny Minnesotan town of New Ulm, full of eccentric, two-dimensional characters, who evidently live just down the road from Fargo.
The Scandinavian-American accents and bizarre colloquialisms are laid on thick from the opening scene, in which four women sit around a kitchen table talking tapioca.
Nice people, but they are sketched so flimsily, you fear they will blow over in one strong gust of wind that whips through this sheltered community.
Into the winter wonderland comes ambitious executive Lucy Hill (Renee Zellweger), who has been hired by her bosses back in Miami to spearhead the restructuring of the town's ailing Munck Foods plant.
Lucy is a city girl with a love of shoes, who always has one perfectly mascara-ed eye on the next rung up the career ladder.
Unfortunately, what she finds in New Ulm is snow, more snow, the odd stray cow in the middle of the road and union representative Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick Jr), who intends to safeguard the jobs of as many employees as possible.
The locals, including Munck Foods secretary Blanche Gunderson (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) and local realtor Trudy Van Uuden (Frances Conroy), welcome Lucy with a warm smile.
'She seems nice enough,' chirps Blanche.
'I doubt she'll last a week, poor thing,' replies Trudy when she realises the new gal in town is ill equipped to fend for herself.
At first, Lucy clashes with all and sundry, even firing plant foreman Stu Kopenhafer (JK Simmons).
However, she soon settles into the ebb and flow of town life and discovers an affinity with her new neighbours.
New In Town is fatally flawed by design.
The cast don't stand a chance.
For a start it's preposterous that a businesswoman like Lucy, who is supposedly destined for the position of vice president, would turn up in Minnesota a few weeks before Christmas wearing a pair of designer heels and a cardigan.
Similarly, she would not tour a manufacturing plant in those very same heels and run the risk of getting her shoes stuck in one of the many grated walkways.
The romance between Zellweger and Connick Jr leaves us as cold as a blast of that sub-zero wind.
A potentially moving scene in which Ted talks candidly about his dead wife's degenerative heart defect jars badly and consequently feels hollow.
The leading lady gamely embraces all of the physical comedy, like getting stuck in a jumpsuit and falling over in the show, but Zellweger alone cannot polish something that is dull to its frozen core.
Release Date: Friday 27 February 2009
Certificate: 12A
Runtime: 96mins
