After inching his way up from a dreadful career to the somewhat evocative ‘Ever After’, Andy Tennant should have left well enough alone. Bringing us such fine directing efforts as ‘Ferris Bueller’ (that’s the television show, not the movie), ‘The Amy Fisher Story’, ‘Sliders’, and the hopelessly goofy ‘Fools Rush In’, Tennant then gave us something surprisingly watchable in ‘Ever After’. Since then, he has treated us to ‘Anna and the King’, and ‘Sweet Home Alabama’.

Reese Witherspoon, in not a terrible performance, plays Melanie, a (according to the movie) ‘hick made good’ who is a top fashion designer. Melanie lives the glamorous life (sort of), and her boyfriend Andrew (Patrick Dempsey) has just proposed to her. But before she can marry Prince Charming, she has a little snag to work out. She has to leave the good life in New York, and go back to Alabama and get a divorce. Josh Lucas (‘You Can Count On Me’, ‘A Beautiful Mind’), doing his best Matthew McConaughey impression, plays Jake, Melanie’s childhood sweetheart and husband.

Melanie hasn’t been home for seven years, and her general attitude toward her hometown manifests itself in her attitude toward Jake. He’s a goofy, beer-guzzling, beat-up-pick-up-driving, redneck (or whatever), and she just wants to get him out of her life for good so she can go back to her fairy tale. Jake, on the other hand, refuses to give her a divorce because she’s turned into a ‘hoity-toity Yankee’.

Thrown into this fiasco, fiancee Andrew flies down to the old homestead, and his mother happens to be mayor of New York City. They’re big budget Yankees, and worlds are going to collide.

We progress along our story with Melanie becoming more and more re-ingrained into ‘southern society’, and trying to come to grips with feelings she might still have for Jake. As if for no other reason than to further confuse Melanie, Jake seems to have become an artist. Uh oh, he might be an actual person after all.

‘Sweet Home Alabama’ takes us on an absolute roller-coaster ride of stupidity the likes of which we rarely see (in something trying to be serious), even considering the state of cinema being what it is. The south is portrayed in a way we haven’t seen since the Duke boys whooped it up on the small screen. Somehow, Bo and Luke managed to make us think of southern small-town charm in a way similar to (yet very different from) ‘The Andy Griffith Show’. It may have been a bit self-mocking, but it didn’t cross the line and actually make fun of that which it portrayed (much).

‘Sweet Home Alabama’, on the other hand, may as well have been sponsored by the Ad Council for Northern States Tourism (if there were such a thing). You might find the story a little cute, maybe even a bit on the legitimately ‘romantic-comedy’ side (though how I can’t imagine), but you certainly aren’t about to plan a trip to Alabama.

To make matters worse, apart from a few (a very few) mildly amusing moments, the dialogue of the film is as stupid as the South the movie is trying to portray. Our characters, all of them, only have two things to say: borderline retarded attempts at wit, and borderline retarded attempts at making cliched platitudes believable as something someone would actually let fall in conversation.

It’s hard to say that Reese Witherspoon and Josh Lucas were bad exactly, considering what they had to work with. They were, I suppose, actually pretty good all things considered. They were fairly believable, as far as believability is possible, and there was some chemistry between them. Patrick Dempsey, overblown honor at the end notwithstanding, was quite good. Candice Bergen (who is the female answer to DeNiro, Pacino, and Nicholson, which is to say she doesn’t do anything but Candice Bergen impersonations), as Andrew’s mother, can’t illicit any more response from the audience than a roll of the eyes. Did the powers that be, we have to wonder, know they were casting Murphy Brown for the movie, or did they think casting Candice Bergen meant something else?


The end result here is a combination of (mostly) good actors, a hopelessly stupid story, ineffectual (almost non-existent) direction, unbelievable dialogue moving back and forth between characters who simply can’t be real, and a slew of gags aimed at ridiculing the South. It all adds up to something painful to watch.

I’m not actually opposed to poking fun at the South (or the North, or whoever really), but there’s poking fun, and then there’s poking fun. There’s also being fun, funny, or even remotely entertaining, and this movie doesn’t manage any of those things.

Recommended:
No