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If I were an entertainment writer or a junket whore, I might start off this review with the provocative question: Is Reese Witherspoon the new Meg Ryan??!! Cute and blonde, perky and funny, she seems primed to take over the mantle of America's favorite blonde now that Meg is pushing middle age. Reese burst onto the scene with last year's surprise SMASH Legally Blonde, married that hottie hunk Ryan Phillippe, and just broke the bank for $15million to star in the LB sequel. Could life get any better for this Southern sweetheart?

Fortunately, my editor hates entertainment gossip as much as I do, so those looking for answers to asinine questions about Hollywood's pecking order will have to read Bill Zwecker's column instead. Those wondering about Reese's new movie, Sweet Home Alabama, can keep reading.

This time around, Reese stars as Melanie, a girl from Alabama who fled her hometown for the bright lights of New York. There she set up shop as a fashion designer and is on the brink of big things. She's also dating the New York equivalent of royalty--the mayor's son Andrew (Patrick Dempsey), who has a Kennedy-esque flair about him. And when he rents out the entire Tiffany's jewelry store for an evening, we can hear the wedding bells as well as not-so-subtle references to earlier romantic comedies.

Of course, there's a catch. There's always a catch. In this case, the fly in the ointment is that Melanie is married to someone else, high-school sweetheart and redneck hick Jake (Josh Lucas). So Melanie drives her fancy BMW back to red-dirt Alabama to convince Jake to finally sign the divorce papers she keeps sending him. Of course, it's not that easy (the movie has to be longer than a hour, mind you), so Melanie ends up staying in her hometown to work things out. There she's forced to confront her past in the form of her parents and friends, all of whom are fascinated by her new-found fame and put off by her harsh, Yankee ways.

I should admit that I'm a sucker for these kind of movies--the ones where a high-falutin' city slicker finds herself in a small town and learns the true meaning of community. Doc Hollywood, a 1991 film starring Michael J. Fox, is a perfect example and a genuine guilty pleasure for this reviewer. Don't get me wrong. I love Chicago and all that it offers, but sometimes my blue-collar roots of Flint, Michigan seem awfully attractive, particularly if I can appreciate them from afar. So when Melanie goes to an agricultural fair on a beautiful Southern night with dancing and soft lighting (Doc Hollywood has a scene just like it), I got all sappy.

It doesn't hurt that Witherspoon is genuinely delightful. She has a charisma that is contagious but doesn't overshadow her co-stars. Never too syrupy, she also has an edge about her that makes her character more real than we usually find in romantic comedy leads. She can be genuinely mean, particularly in a scene when she drinks too much, and her indecision in choosing between her two loves is never minimized.

The writing in Sweet Home Alabama, courtesy of C. Jay Cox, is also stronger than usual for the genre. The scenes with Melanie and her parents (played by Mary Kay Place and Fred Ward) ring true, embodying both the love they feel but also the difficulty in going home again. The Southern flair sometimes borders on the stereotypical (Melanie's father is part of a Civil War re-enactment) and the redneck nature of the town is a bit much (the bar scenes seem forced), but the relationships themselves are convincing, at
least by the standards of romantic comedies.

Nonetheless, the movie can't escape all of the genre's conventions. We have to have some sort of villain, which falls to Andrew's mother-mayor, played by Candice Bergen in a reprise of her willful Murphy Brown role. Furthermore, it's an absolute requirement that every significant character finds true love by the end. So when we discover that one of Melanie's hometown friends is gay, it doesn't take a fortune teller to know that we might see one of her gay friends from New York before long (he's a fellow fashion designer, of course). And though the film makes a convincing case that true love comes with its share of problems, those are all banished in the movie's closing moments. Only happy pictures of married bliss are allowed. All of this leaves a somewhat sour taste for a movie that's certainly candy-coated.   

J. Robert Parks  10/2/2002