Sweet Home Alabama: Movie & DVD Review (2002)

9/07/2007 Posted by Admin

When moonshine isn't enough

(Originally published 2002)

You can almost smell the apple pies baking and the moonshine brewing in Andy Tennant's "Sweet Home Alabama," a romantic comedy starring Reese Witherspoon as a small-town girl from Pigeon Creek, Ala., who's willed herself to forget her white-trash roots by moving to Manhattan and immersing herself in haute couture.

The film, from a script by C. Jay Cox, has none of the biting wit of Witherspoon's best films--"Election" and "Pleasantville"--but then, go figure, it's not meant to.

Coming hot on the heels of last year's megahit "Legally Blonde," "Sweet Home Alabama" is the next step in a calculated move to broaden Witherspoon's appeal, which means featuring her in less edgy films--you know, the unthreatening sort that appeal to most everyone, such as those in the breadbasket or, for that matter, in Alabama.

For the studios, the strategy is paying off nicely; "Alabama" made $35 million in its opening weekend and became the nation’s top film. It’s also paying off financially for Witherspoon, who’s set to earn $15 million for "Legally Blonde 2." But for Witherspoon’s die-hard fans, those who first fell in love with her as the mean-spirited Tracy Flick and who prefer that she not be homogenized, the news is less bright. Indeed, it looks as if the actress will be spooning them cubes of sugar for a while.

In "Alabama," Witherspoon is Melanie Carmichael, an up-and-coming fashion designer who has almost--but not quite--succeeded in obliterating any trace of the hick she was before fleeing to New York.

When Manhattan's most eligible bachelor, Andrew Hennings (Patrick Dempsey), proposes to her at Tiffany's, Melanie accepts but with reservations. When she fled Pigeon Creek seven years ago, she skipped out on everyone, including her blue-eyed, redneck husband Jake (Josh Lucas), who refused to give her a divorce because he was still in love with the girl he fell when they were just children.

Now desperate for a legal separation so she can marry Andrew, who’s clueless about her past, Melanie returns home, confronts Jake and allows the long-dormant fireworks between them to erupt between them.

You’d have to be a shut-in to not know how the movie pans out, so it’s especially surprising that it works as well as it does in spite of its formulaic story. Once again, just as in “The Banger Sisters,” the film is lifted out of the ordinary by its cast. Witherspoon may be in the process of softening her image, but she still has some fight left to her yet and gives the film more depth and spunk than it deserves. As Jake, Lucas does his job and smolders on cue, but nobody here is hotter than Candice Bergen.

As Andrew’s mother, Kate, Bergen plays the mayor of New York City as if there were a broom and a black cat forever at her side. She’s given the film’s best lines and, with her trademark cynicism, effortlessly steals each scene she’s in.

Grade: B-