'Women' of average build

By Dan Moore

Published April 27, 2007

First, a word about the title: "In the Land of Women" sounds like the kind of novel older women buy at grocery stores with Fabio on the cover, or like a B movie from the '50s about a bunch of bad actors stumbling upon a lost race of Amazons. The title and the ham-fisted promotion are a shame because lost in this bizarre marketing is a decent movie.

Rather than Fabio or Ed Wood, think of a low-rent "Garden State." Adam Brody plays a disaffected youth with a weird name (Carter Webb) and a predilection toward staring off into space and being disaffected. He's stuck in a dead-end job (he writes soft-core porn) and he finds enlightenment in some unlikely women.

The big difference between "In the Land of Women" and "Garden State," or any number of other bildungsromans and films, is that none of these women are perfect — or perfect for him. There's his grandmother, who provides bits of wisdom while she descends into senility; Sarah Hardwicke, a disenchanted housewife played pitch-perfectly by Meg Ryan; and the housewife's two daughters, teenaged Lucy and adolescent Paige.

Webb's grandmother is played for laughs. She is so convinced she's going to die that she drills her grandson on the telephone number for the hospice, even though there's nothing physically wrong with her. Youngest daughter, Paige, is an enlightened innocent of the J.D. Salinger school, mixing maturity and naiveté in equal amounts to salve Carter's disillusionment.

First-time director Jon Kasdan (son of Lawrence "The Big Chill" Kasdan) pulls off another neat Salingerian trick with the remaining women. Like Salinger in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Kasdan skirts the line between affection and prurience among Carter and the women, avowing the (mostly) innocent nature of their relationships, and at the same time, he makes it seem like there's another shoe about to drop. Instead of skirting around the awkwardness of the issues — Carter is 10 years apart from both the mother and the daughter — Kasdan illustrates it in a tense, unspoken way that does much to liven up his otherwise mannered, boring direction.

Unfortunately, the Salinger comparisons end well short of the dialogue, which is mediocre and stilted at best. Kasdan (who wrote and directed) has a sharp ear for witticisms and irony, and Brody possesses a sort of stammering Woody Allen charm that he uses to great effect. But in the serious moments, we see major character change, and we watch the actors respond to dialogue. But the things they say seem too cliché and meaningless to cause such reactions.

This is not a perfect movie, suffering as it does from pedestrian direction and a script that doesn't explain some excellent performances, but it promises better things in the future from all involved. And it certainly doesn't deserve a title that appears to come from the lost third "Grindhouse" movie.