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| POSTED Monday , February 16, 2004 02:40:23 AM |
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This is a movie which depends on everyone behaving like idiots in a world which doesn't in the slightest resemble reality.
First, what world is this? In this fantasy Pacific County (it's San Mateo County, California, just south of San Francisco -- maybe the producers were afraid of being sued for libel; the Pacifica Pier is shown and the boyfriend lives inthe very real town of Millbrae) the protagonist's home is sold for $500 in taxes in a few months and she's living in her car within the week. Not in THIS country. Never mind her not owing the taxes, which is irrelevant to the Colonel's land title -- he'd be the holder in due course and her recourse is, as he says, against the county -- or the fact that, if I'm not mistaken, all those get-rich-quick books about buying property at sheriff's auction for pennies on the dollar suffer from the fact that in most (all?) states the title holder still has a period of time (a year?) to redeem the lien at its face value plus a fixed percentage before the purchaser can get clear title. No, never mind that. Just consider the fact that if the government sells your property to satisfy a tax lien it only gets to keep the amount due plus costs, so our heroine should have $40+ grand in her bank account after the sale.
So the set-up is nonsense. And the execution goes downhill from there. Is our heroine too drugged-out or depressed to get out of bed and pick up her mail? That might be plausible, but...at one point she explains that her job as a housekeeper doesn't pay enough to hire a lawyer and for once she's not making it up. She's actually shown vacuuming someone's floor while the brat of the house watches big-screen MTV. Was that in the book or is its insertion in the screenplay an actress' attempt to make her character more sympathetic, or a story conference artifact? One suspects one of the latter -- being a Merry Maid may not pay much, but keeping the job requires a degree of organization that is completely incompatable with our heroine's behavior otherwise. The name slips my mind, but there's a fairly well known book that came out within the last year or so by a writer who tried to live on exactly that job (and waitressing, and other minimum wage jobs) for a year, and she's quite convincing on that point.
And why is the boyfriend so out of control? Yes, he might assume the Colonel is so fresh off the boat as to be susceptable to being pushed around, but when the complaint is filed against him its only their word against his, and as one of only eight training officers in the department he's not going to lose his job unless they've got it on videotape. He breaks in and kidnaps the family for no plausible reason except to advance the plot.
And the kid might be immature enough to play cowboy in the disastrous denoumont, but what is Kingsley's character doing playing John Wayne? Being stupid and out of control to advance the plot, of course, which is the one thing he couldn't do and still be who he'd been to that point.
Two hours of people unaccountably behaving stupidly. Save your money and time.
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