Trailer flash

The preview trailer for Sweet Home Alabama runs about two and a half minutes; the movie is maybe an hour and 40 minutes. Either one will tell you the whole story from beginning to end. (This is one of those preview trailers that gives away not only the plot but also most of the good jokes, as if the filmmakers want to reassure us that we won’t get anything we can’t see coming a month away.) Whether you want to see the trailer or the film depends on how much you enjoy Reese Witherspoon; the film gives you more of her, but the trailer wastes less of your time.

Sweet Home Alabama isn’t bad, really. It’s merely excruciating. Excruciatingly ordinary, unimaginative and slow in spinning out its paltry little story. Witherspoon plays Melanie Carmichael, a rising New York fashion designer. Melanie has the world on a string, including the love of the JFK Jr.-ish son (Patrick Dempsey) of New York City’s mayor (Candice Bergen). When her dreamboat charters Tiffany’s so he can pop the question at a private party for two, Melanie ecstatically accepts. Now, all she has to do is go back to her Alabama hometown and get a divorce from that good ol’ boy (Josh Lucas) she married straight out of high school and ran out on six years ago. In the process of trying to get his signature on the divorce papers, she learns that he is actually the mastermind of an international opium cartel, plotting to build an organized crime empire by taking over the United States one state at a time. Only a daring rescue by her new boyfriend, a high-speed chase between an Apache helicopter and a souped-up swamp boat, foils the villain’s plans as the 81st U.S. Airborne parachutes in to wrap things up.

OK, so I made that last part up. But hey, I had to do something. Sweet Home Alabama unfolds with the grueling inevitability of a dripping faucet. After the first two or three drops, you know just when the next one is coming, precisely where it’s going to hit and exactly what it will look and sound like. You wait for each drip, knowing it’s coming and wincing when it finally arrives. Let’s see, what else is worth mentioning? Well, for one thing, Lucas (Russell Crowe’s campus rival in A Beautiful Mind) looks to be the new screen heartthrob, if Sweet Home Alabama makes the money its makers are hoping for. He has charm and ease, although a strong resemblance to Matthew McConaughey may work against him.

And, oh yes, the filmmakers; I should mention them, even though neither script nor direction exhibit any personality whatsoever. This is a movie that sounds like it was written by a computer and looks like it was directed by a camera. Still, according to the credits, it was written by Douglas J. Eboch and C. Jay Cox and directed by Andy Tennant.

There are others in the cast, of course, besides Witherspoon, Lucas, Dempsey and Bergen. Witherspoon’s parents are played by Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place, both of whom are always welcome and never seem to get as much work as they deserve. Lucas’ mother is Jean Smart—like Ward and Place, always welcome, but unlike them largely wasted here.

Rounding out the principal cast is Ethan Embry as a hometown pal of Witherspoon’s, a closeted gay whom she cruelly outs in a drunken snit. (One of the clichés of movies like this is that the so-called heroine is a shallow, selfish, destructive, mean-spirited shrew—think of Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding—yet we’re supposed to like her just because she’s played by Witherspoon. If you want proof that Witherspoon is now a bona fide star, there it is.) Sweet Home Alabama wants nothing but to be entertaining, and it may turn the trick for some. It has a cute premise that could fit into a sentence of 25 one-syllable words. It stars one of the hottest and most interesting young actresses in Hollywood, pairs her with a dreamy down-home hunk and tosses in a platoon of reliable pros on the backbench. It is exactly what it seems—no more, no less—and, frankly, it’s the kind of movie I absolutely despise.