Column:

Zellweger and Connick lack dimension in 'New in Town'

The romantic comedy fails to characterize the leads effectively.

By Dan Moore

Published Feb. 3, 2009

Part of the fun of a romantic comedy, speaking as a heterosexual male and therefore a highly-selective fan of the genre, is that the leads not only obviously belong together but also belong among what passes in romantic comedies for the best of us.

The best romantic leads, from Cary Grant to Carole Lombard, are movie stars, but their characters don't know it. By the end of the movie, they leave their inexplicable dead-end jobs and single lives behind and go onto their predestined lives as romantic heroes and heroines.

"New In Town" didn't get this memo and is no less formulaic for it. The result is the arbitrary courtship of two people we don't particularly want to be happy.

Renee Zellweger stars as Lucy Hill, a female executive of the always-mentioning-she's-a-female-executive variety who is sent to rural Minnesota to close down a factory whose union rep, Ted Mitchell, happens to be Harry Connick Jr. I don't want to give too much away, but they start off hating each other and end up finding common ground, if you can believe it. Meanwhile, the secondary characters are given gurgling, monosyllabic names like Blanche and set up with a "Fargo" accent and one quaint hobby apiece.

In the film's defense, there's an understood formula here, but "New In Town" follows it with little grace and less invention. Everyone goes through the motions as if that is enough to fulfill every genre convention, rather than adding some distinguishing characteristic or worldview.

Most fatally, the romantic leads are annoying at their best and repellent at their worst. This is the kind of romantic comedy where, rather than the characters meeting each other in the process of doing something funny and unique, the two of them get to know each other by yelling across a dinner table and making sweeping generalizations. Both characters talk as though they're summarizing themselves for a movie pitch. Ted actually uses the phrase "robber barons" within an hour of meeting Lucy, who quickly growls at her secretary about how hard she has to work as a woman in the workplace. The film operates under the assumption that simply chanting these mantras will bring the characters to life.

This failure of characterization is, finally, the movie's inescapable flaw. A romantic comedy can be unbelievable, as this one is. It can be formulaic, as this one is. But the one thing it absolutely cannot be is sloppy with its main characters, and "New in Town" has no grasp of this cardinal rule. In the end Lucy and Ted show no more chemistry than the average eHarmony testimonial couple. Each lead is given exactly one trait, and they don't share it in common, so when they get together it can only be because they've recognized each other as movie stars and are determined to get out of movie Minnesota before the Coen Brothers feed them through a wood chipper.