In "Sweet Home Alabama," Reese Witherspoon solidifies her position as America's Sweetheart (in the process raising the unsettling question of whether Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan are already dowager queens). With her preternaturally big, blue eyes and insouciant chin, Witherspoon is nothing if not watchable, but in such outings as "Election" and "Legally Blonde" she proved to be more than merely decorative. Here, she's given less substantial material to work with; she makes the most of it, but "Sweet Home Alabama" is still thin gruel.
Witherspoon plays Melanie Carmichael, a young fashion designer who is in the process of setting Manhattan on fire, not only with a knockout show during Fashion Week but by becoming engaged to the Kennedyesque son of the city's mayor (Candice Bergen). After disposing with these expository details with New-York-minute alacrity, "Sweet Home Alabama" sends Melanie to Pigeon Creek, Ala., where she has some unfinished business in the form of a husband named Jake (Josh Lucas).
Reese Witherspoon, Patrick Dempsey and Candice Bergen star in "Sweet Home Alabama."
(Touchstone Pictures)
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"Sweet Home Alabama" has to do with Melanie's return home, not only to her estranged husband – who was her childhood sweetheart – but to her parents, her former friends and her past life as a legendary hell-raiser. It's a rich vein to explore both for humor and something deeper, but writers C. Jay Cox and Douglas J. Eboch are content to lob softball jokes involving Bubbas, bloodhounds and benighted Civil War reenactors.
Pretty much everything you need to know about "Sweet Home Alabama" is held in the fact that Melanie's parents' names are Earl and Pearl and they live in a double-wide trailer decorated with Rebel flags and acrylic afghans. Such incidental characters as Jimmy Lee, Bobby Ray and Stella Kay hang out down at the roadhouse where, one might fairly surmise, they crack corn and whittle.
Director Andy Tennant sets up a conflict between cruel, shallow city slicksters and pure country folk, but his distaste for the latter is so poorly disguised that the entire enterprise of "Sweet Home Alabama" finally collapses in a heap of general contempt. As a visual stylist, Tennant has a good eye for the voluptuous surfaces that make American romantic comedies such indulgent confections. The engagement scene, set in Tiffany's after hours with a battalion of sales agents standing behind acres of diamond rings, glints with alluring excess, as does one of the film's final scenes set amid a lambent collection of perfect Simon Pearce glassware. But everything in between is really rather homely, including Melanie's oddly fashion un-forward wardrobe.
Witherspoon and Lucas are both impossibly attractive, and with his squinty grin and piercing gaze he often looks like the young Paul Newman. Both his and Witherspoon's peepers are of such azure intensity that after their encounters you expect to see little blue-edged bullet holes where their eyes should be.
But even such considerable physical charms are no match for the generic predictability of the story in "Sweet Home Alabama." Rather than force Melanie to confront her most dearly held assumptions, the filmmakers give her an easy out. They transform her diamond-in-the-rough into a suitably New Agey entrepreneur, and on the way manage to elide the vexing issues of sexuality and race that tug at the film's edges. At the movie's thoroughly expected conclusion, a visual joke has a bedraggled cat licking at the icing on a wedding cake, but it's really Melanie who gets to have it and eat it, too.
SWEET HOME ALABAMA (PG-13, 110 minutes) – Contains profanity and sexual references. At area theaters.
