**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Feuerstein
screenplay by Susannah Grant, based on the novel by Jennifer Weiner
directed by Curtis Hanson
by Walter Chaw It looks like exactly the kind of formula chick-lit/chick-flick I detest, and not just because, for the most part, when you call something a "chick-" anything, you're doing it at the expense of the "Sex and the City" bimbos you imagine flock to this garbage like a swarm of Jimmy Choo shoe-flies. But Curtis Hanson, with In Her Shoes, overcomes (for an hour or so) that pigeonholing the same way he survived working with Eminem and Brittany Murphy–the same way he brought an adaptation of James Ellroy's un-adaptable L.A. Confidential to the screen and managed to tremor the delicate, carefully-sheathed grace nerve of Michael Chabon in Wonder Boys. His protagonists are worried about their weight, their bank account, and their shoes, of course, but Hanson (whose biggest accomplishment may be in disguising screenwriter Susannah Grant's propensity to pander to her audience in nasty, hypocritical strokes) makes those worries seem important in dissecting the psychology and interpersonal dynamics of his feuding sisters and wizened grandmamma. He shoots Philadelphia as though it were a blight and Florida like a shimmering summer daydream (or a Coppertone commercial)–and I thought that the moment that I would lose respect for it would come around the corner of every single epiphany, but it didn't arrive until admirably late in the game. It's a chick-flick, no question, but it's one with half a brain. Not much, but half a brain is half more than expected.
Maggie (Cameron Diaz) and Rose (Toni Collette) are sisters, the former a bimbo slut, the latter a successful attorney with body image issues. When Maggie seduces Rose's predatory boss/boyfriend the night after her vapid, party-girl persona almost gets her raped in an impound lot, Rose puts her out on the street and promptly takes a permanent vacation from her law office to become a dog-walker fond of running, Rocky-like, up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum. Maggie, meanwhile, discovers she has a long-lost grandmother, Ella (Shirley MacLaine), living in a retirement community in the Sunshine State and estranged since the suicide of Rose and Maggie's crazy mother (Ivana Milicevic), thus she goes on a spiritual renaissance during which she learns how to read at the bedside of a blind professor (Norman Lloyd) and how to feel at the foot of crusty Ella. Yeah, it's heartfelt sap with the illiterate dingbat whore finding her inner-scholar in the pages of Elizabeth Bishop and e.e. cummings and funny old people–not to mention the ugly duckling learning self-esteem through the tender ministrations of a preternaturally patient, bespectacled colleague Simon (Mark Feuerstein). When the film ends with one of those (Muriel's?) weddings where every secondary character, no matter how inconsequential, shows up in the bad movie equivalent of a curtain call, In Her Shoes well and truly tests Hanson's ability to tread sewage.
But he does pretty well, all things considered. Even as you're ticking off the conventions, you marvel that Hanson has managed to insert a nice little riff on the democratizing power of professional sports; and even as you lube those eyeballs for rolling, you're gratified by Hanson's deft touch in making Diaz's character a reprehensible, charmless lizard who, nonetheless, has a family that loves her. It's a considerable missed opportunity, then, that In Her Shoes goes soft after a semi-harrowing (mortifying, in fact) opening, since it's armed to the end with tough, layered performances by Collette and MacLaine. If there's something that marks "chick-lit/chick-flick" products, it's not the "Sex and the City"/"Desperate Housewives"-bawdy chic, but rather that Jane Austen malady (that "Austenticity"), which makes feints towards deflating social mores and the peculiarities of cloistered women looking for a match but resolves inevitably in cotillions, light social comedy, and marriage, natch. At the end, Hanson is no match for the grinding gears of this dread machinery, and In Her Shoes becomes the very pandering, frustratingly pat thing you thought it would be all along. But for the stuff that's good, and the parts that feel dizzy and dangerous, it's worth a look. Originally published: October 7, 2005.
by Bill Chambers Fox shepherds In Her Shoes to DVD in a somewhat problematic 2.33:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer*. The soft-edged, naturalistic detail is pleasing enough but the image is compromised by a solarized appearance that mutes even the most intense pools of light. Still, there's a whiff of intentionality to the presentation's shortcomings–they suggest that the film was "flashed" (that is, exposed to light before being run through the camera) to evoke the diffuse, earthy aesthetic of Robert Altman's Seventies output: a technique that has often yielded big-screen works of art…and small-screen mud. The accompanying 5.1 Dolby Digital audio capably renders a by-the-numbers comedy-drama mix, though the occasional splash of music (diegetic and non-diegetic alike) calls the entire soundstage to action. The volume level of dialogue is a bit too low for my tastes.
Three featurettes from production house Deuce Three constitute the disc's supplementary material. The classy "The People in the Shoes" (16 mins.) plays as a video commentary of sorts, with Curtis Hanson and select cast and crew–including an alarmingly haggard-looking Cameron Diaz–mostly circumventing the EPK clichés through insightful and/or heartfelt observations. Hanson points out several directorial flourishes I can't say I was consciously aware of, such as a reflective-surface motif and the incorporation of John Register's Modernist paintings into various backdrops; truth be told, I've always considered Hanson to be something of a hack who landed a few critic-proof projects, and this piece left me with the distinct aftertaste of crow. "A Retirement Community for Acting Seniors" (11 mins.) and "From Death Row to Red Carpet: The Casting of Honey Bun" (8 mins.) are comparatively uninformative, the former playing like the pilot episode for "Old Folks Say the Darnedest Things" and the latter amounting to one of Bob Barker's animal-shelter PSAs. A promo reel hawking the studio's recent hits cues up before the main menu, while an "Inside Look" at Lindsay Lohan's latest loaf, Just My Luck, rounds out the disc.
130 minutes; PG-13; 2.33:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French Dolby Surround, Spanish Dolby Surround; DVD-9; Region One; Fox
*Also available in fullscreen
