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Renee Zellweger has been having a rough time of it lately.
Fashion pundits singled her out as worst-dressed at the Golden Globes, and when Entertainment Weekly did a do-over poll about Oscar winners, voters said Shohreh Aghdashloo should have won the 2003 supporting award for "House of Sand and Fog" instead of Zellweger, who took it for "Cold Mountain." In fact, she came in last in the poll.
But no one is repossessing her Oscar, and while "New in Town," pairing Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr., doesn't reinvent the romcom, it's pleasant although utterly predictable. It's like movie mac and cheese, made not with a secret recipe or exotic ingredients but staples from the pantry and fridge.
Zellweger is Lucy Hill, a corporate climber in Miami who volunteers for a temporary assignment to retrofit and downsize a food plant in New Ulm, Minn.
On Day One, she locks horns with widowed father Ted Mitchell (Connick), so you know love is in the cards. Almost as pre-destined is a twist about the fate of the factory in New Ulm, population 13,593, and you may have the light bulb over your head before anyone on screen does.
- Starring: Renee Zellweger, Harry Connick Jr.
- Rating: PG for language and some suggestive material
- Web site: NewInTownMovie.com
"New in Town" improves once Lucy quits being a warm-weather, big-city ninny.
No smart woman with access to a computer or The Weather Channel would wear high heels on a plane ride to Minnesota in the middle of winter and then teeter around a factory in them. For a person in her corporate position, she also proves incredibly gullible at times.
As she warms up to New Ulm, the movie warms up, too. The residents, with their love of scrapbooking and talk about finding Jesus, turn from cheap targets for laughs and scorn to near-characters played by the likes of J.K. Simmons, Siobhan Fallon and Frances Conroy.
A Dane named Jonas Elmer makes his English-language directing debut, with a script by C. Jay Cox ("Sweet Home Alabama") and Kenneth Rance. If the backdrop looks authentically frigid, that's because Winnipeg doubled for Minnesota and temperatures reportedly dipped to 53 below at times.
Zellweger has long been on the chick-flick or romcom radar, and Connick is a reliable go-to guy for heartbroken or lovelorn women, as he proved with "Hope Floats" and "Will & Grace."
"New in Town" absolutely is not in the same comedic class with, say, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," "Bridget Jones's Diary" or "When Harry Met Sally." It's too bland and formulaic, but it does strike a nerve about job cuts and what they mean to the people behind the numbers.
In a case of sad serendipity, "New in Town" has never been more timely. It's just too bad that fairy-tale endings for working-class folks aren't spilling off the screen and into the real world these days.
