'Win a Date' sets country girl in la-la land

Friday, January 23, 2004

By Ron Weiskind, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

To quote the late philosopher and comedian George Burns, "The secret to acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made."

	'Win A Date With Tad Hamilton' Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, some drug references and language. Starring: Kate Bosworth, Josh Duhamel, Topher Grace. Director: Robert Luketic.

The real joke is that Hollywood contains more insincerity per square inch than anyplace else on Earth. That truism forms the basis for "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton," a romantic comedy about a movie star who means what he says, sort of, when he says he's had it with hacks and hangers-on, frauds and phonies.

Tad (Josh Duhamel) makes his female fans swoon, but his agent (Nathan Lane) and manager (Sean Hayes) are falling over themselves about their client's recent bad-boy antics. They decide to rehabilitate his image by staging a "win a date" contest with the proceeds going to charity.

The winner, West Virginia grocery clerk Rosalee Futch (Kate Bosworth), comes to Hollywood to meet the man of her dreams. As she gawks at the bizarre denizens of Tinseltown and nervously throws up in a limousine, she displays a certain lack of sophistication. The jaded Tad, who expected an ordeal, finds himself charmed by her unspoiled nature (although it doesn't hurt that she's a pretty blonde).

Director Robert Luketic has already established Tad's disquiet in a scene where he ends up all by himself at his fancy home, eating a frozen dinner. The bad-boy antics disguise the fact that he's lonely and unhappy. Still, we figure he's just being nice to Rosalee when he seems to admire the fact that she manages to resist his come-on.

So what are we to make of it when he follows pony-tailed Rosalee to West Virginia and says, "I want some of your goodness to rub off on me"?

Rosalee's cynical boss and best friend, Pete (Topher Grace), who loves her so desperately that he can't summon the courage to tell her, retorts, "He wants your butt to rub off on him."

We can't blame Pete for feeling like the bookworm infatuated with the cheerleader dating the high-school quarterback. He tells Rosalee, "Tad Hamilton is an actor. How do you know he's not acting with you?" Tad seems to have it made, whether or not he's faking it -- and if Rosalee seems increasingly sure that he's sincere, so does the audience.

The only thing in the movie that seems indisputably forced is the comedy. Lane and Hayes are overbearing Hollywood caricatures. Rosalee and her girlfriend Cathy (Ginnifer Goodwin) spend entirely too much time giggling and jumping around like schoolgirls. Cathy's the type who compensates for being a bit heavy by tossing out wisecracks and sexual innuendo. Her romantic imagination might have been inspired from a romance novel.

Meanwhile, Pete is doomed to gentle humiliation in his attempts to compete with Tad, and he keeps telling Rosalee to "guard your carnal treasure," which makes us wonder what decade we're in.

But the movie's retro feel exists partly to differentiate the supposed innocence of West Virginia from the immorality of Hollywood. Rosalee often looks like she should be dating Conrad Birdie, the leading man in "Bye Bye Birdie," the 1950s musical to which "Win a Date ..." bears more than a passing conceptual resemblance. The film's final shot references a kind of Hollywood happy ending from an era when we still believed in them.

"Win a Date with Tad Hamilton" proves its sincerity only when it takes itself seriously. Victor Levin's screenplay shows Tad to be more than skin deep -- the tension between his intentions and the slickness of Duhamel's good looks becomes the key conflict in the movie. Pete spends too much time grumbling and cowering instead of telling Rosalee how he feels, but actor Grace makes us feel his pain and hurt toward the end, especially in some strong scenes opposite Kathyrn Hahn as bartender Angelica, who has an unrequited jones for Pete.

For all her earlier frivolity, Bosworth also makes us feel the weight of Rosalee's choice. One of the real strengths of the movie lies in the fact that we can't be sure exactly how it will turn out, and it's hard to imagine someone won't be hurt in the process. That's more like real life than Hollywood fantasy, but "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton" fakes it pretty well.

E-mail this story   Print this story