THE BACHELOR (New Line) Starring: Chris O'Donnell, Renee Zellweger, Hal Holbrook, James Cromwell, Artie Lange, Marley Shelton, Edward Asner, Peter Ustinov. Screenplay: Steve Cohen, based on the film SEVEN CHANCES. Producers: Bing Howenstein and Lloyd Segan. Director: Gary Sinyor. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 100 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I came to an epiphany while watching THE BACHELOR, an innocuous-enough-on-the-surface romantic comedy. It's not the sort of film in which one would expect to achieve any moment of clarity, but there it was nonetheless. I sat there watching this marshmallow of a movie unfold when suddenly I realized what is so ridiculously wrong with the entire romantic comedy genre circa 1999. In a word, it's the same thing that's wrong with so many movies circa 1999: writing. More to the point, it's the refusal to acknowledge that characterizations matter when you're telling a story about a relationship. THE BACHELOR is merely the latest in a long line of films where we're expected to get dewy-eyed over any pairing of attractive, pleasant people just because they're attractive and pleasant.
In this particular case, Attractive and Pleasant Exhibit A is Jimmy Shannon (Chris O'Donnell), a single guy who has been watching his friends slowly but surely sucked into marriage. It's a scary notion for Jimmy, even though he dearly loves Attractive and Pleasant Exhibit B Anne (Renee Zellweger), his girlfriend of three years. Convinced despite his reservations that it's time to "sh*t or get off the pot," Jimmy proposes to Anne -- very badly. Anne refuses, which leaves Jimmy in a very odd position when his eccentric grandfather (Peter Ustinov) dies and leaves a very specific video will. Jimmy stands to inhereit $100 million if he is married by 6:05 p.m. on his 30th birthday, stays married for 10 years and produces a child. There are only a couple of minor problems: 1) Jimmy's 30th birthday is the next day; 2) Anne is nowhere to be found, meaning Jimmy has to find another willing bride from among his many ex-girlfriends.
It's a wacky, BREWSTER'S MILLIONS-esque premise (acknowledged as such in one of the film's better, more self-aware lines of dialogue), the kind where a shallow and materialistic guy learns What Really Matters. At least that would be the case if Jimmy weren't already a world-class altruist. Screenwriter Steve Cohen slides into the story an even more draconian condition in the will: If Jimmy doesn't get married, not only will he lose all the money, but the family billiard table buisness will be sold out from under him, costing hudreds of jobs. From the outset, Jimmy's motivation isn't cash; it's the livelihoods of his devoted employees. It's almost embarrassing for his marital misgivings to play a role in THE BACHELOR's plot development. By any human standard, the guy is impossibly selfless.
And that's the essence of the gutlessness endemic to films like THE BACHELOR -- the fear of giving the characters flaws to overcome on their way to happiness. There's never any tension between the two star-crossed lovers, because there's no sense that anything remotely significant is at stake. The blandly nice O'Donnell couldn't pull off a randy cad if he tried, so the filmmakers don't even let him; Zellweger's Anne may have issues with her sickeningly affectionate parents as an impossible standard to live up to, but no one dares make her anything but the woman (lightly) wronged. And forget about seeing enough of Jimmy and Anne together to feel invested in their potential reconciliation. The parade of sit-com set pieces had better be damned funny, since they're all that stands between us and a blissfully sweet foregone conclusion.
I'll admit a couple of those set pieces are amusing, including Ustinov's rantings about procreation and a restaurant full-to-bursting with men popping questions and champagne corks. Far more of them are either tedious or downright ghastly, like the shudder-inducing sight of Brooke Shields as an icy fortune-hunter or the hideous collection of stereotypes when hundreds of potential brides gather in a church. You're never going to get too many raucous belly laughs from a film like THE BACHELOR, but that's not the real problem. Nor is it the real problem that you know exactly the kind of warm-n-fuzzy conclusion it's leading up to. The problem are a beginning and middle that are equally warm-n-fuzzy -- there's no spark, no energy, no humanity. It's an emotional pudding guaranteed not to offend any consumer's digestions. We've reached a point where our proxies for cinematic romantic wish fulfillment don't even have a pulse. THE BACHELOR is love among the mannequins.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 wedded blahs: 3.
Visit Scott Renshaw's Screening Room http://www.inconnect.com/~renshaw/ *** Subscribe to receive new reviews directly by email! See the Screening Room for details, or reply to this message with subject "Subscribe".
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews