Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
9/13/09
I don't
usually comment on other reviews on this site, both because I don't like
to read other's full reviews before writing my own and also simply because
you're here to read about movies, not critics. But that said, I can't
help but puzzle over the blurbs I've read about the new Sandra Bullock
comedy All About Steve. It's been almost universally reviled,
registering a lusty 6% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.com. It's
not that I'm unaccustomed to being in those sort of extreme minorities,
and while I'm a bit surprised by how many people are calling this funny,
occasionally poignant and, yes, kinda messy comedy the worst movie of the
year/decade, I'm really amazed by how many have come out of the movie violently
rejecting its' thesis and hating the living daylights out of Bullock's
character. Would I want to sit next to Mary Horowitz on a long bus
ride? Maybe not. But that's All About Steve's point:
showing us the world from the point of view of someone we'd probably dislike
on sight. As such, it gets off to a queasy, uneven start, but I found
it progressively more involving as it went. But I'm just weird that
way, I guess.
Mary
(Sandra Bullock) writes crossword puzzles for a Sacramento newspaper.
Talky, desperately full of trivia, and lacking a social filter, she's an
outsider at work, lives with her parents (Howard Hessman & Brea Grant),
and has no apparent friends. One particularly bad day finds her assaulted
with rejection, mockery and a relentless drumbeat of how she needs to be
“normal”. As a result, she agrees to a blind date set up by her parents
and it's love at first sight with Steve (Bradley Cooper), a cameraman for
a cable news network. She throws herself so hard and so fast at him
that the date never even gets past the curb outside of her parents' house,
but Steve makes a big mistake in the way he calls things off: he
fakes a news emergency and tells Mary he wishes she could be on the road
with him. After getting fired from her job for creating a puzzle
exclusively about her new favorite topic (yes, that would be Steve), she
takes it as a sign that he is destined to hit the road and track him down.
Once she does, she finds her True Love working with vain reporter Hartman
(Thomas Haden Church) and producer/babysitter Angus (Ken Jeong).
Hartman's tickled to death by the notion that Steve's got a stalker and
relentlessly encourages Mary to pursue the relationship. And as the
reporters fly from one story to another, she follows, with new friends
Howard (DJ Qualls) and Elizabeth (Katy Mixon) in tow. And it's all
fun and games until Mary stops following the stories and becomes one herself.
We
only get to do this once, and we only get to be who we are. And very
few of us get to be George Clooney. Be we ugly, boring, too dumb,
too smart, or in some nebulous way “weird”, most are doomed to fight a
lifelong losing battle against society's call to be more like everybody
else. While it is superficially a big, loud comedy as desperate to
please a crowd as Mary is to find true love, All About Steve understands
these things on a level rarely seen in the movies. While she's fought
against that niche throughout her career, Bullock has a real gift for playing
characters beaten down by loneliness, and it makes her the perfect choice
to play this spectacularly odd character. Mary's found something
in life (crossword puzzles) that really makes her happy, but when you're
running back upstairs to update your hamster on the progress of your evening,
clearly something is missing. How “crazy” she is when the movie starts
is up for debate, but she clearly snaps after being belittled by her boss
and mocked by a Career Day class of dimwitted kids. In her mind,
having a guy like Steve would make her just like everyone else, and she
goes truly bananas in pursuit of that goal. It's to Bullock's credit
that she's able to make Mary a “fun stalker”, to the point where Steve's
increasing fear of her seems silly. But the most important point
is that All About Steve isn't one of those movies that thinks anything
is OK as long as two attractive actors end up canoodling before the end
credits. Steve and Mary have NOTHING in common and should NEVER be
a couple, and the movie does get that. That the cross-country odyssey
brings her across the paths of a couple of oddballs who can appreciate
her for who she is is the fantasy at play here, and in that sense, it's
kind of an anti-romantic comedy.
As
I've mentioned, the movie gets off to a somewhat rocky start, in part because
TV director Phil Traill either can't control his tone or is trying to draw
the audience in to share the other characters disgust with Mary before
turning it around on them. Either way, early scenes like one where
a bus pulls over for a fake rest stop to let her off before driving away
have a queasy ring, and the plot development that gets her fired from the
paper is jaw-slackening. Seriously, how could a ridiculous crossword
like the Steve-centered one she writes up find its' way into the paper?
Didn't anyone check? And if they didn't, is she really the person
who needs to be fired? I felt like there was a missing moment that
would explain all this, but that's not really giving the filmmakers too
much credit, because that implies they were smart enough to film it and
then dumb enough to take it out.
But
if you can ride it out until Steve gets on the road with his news team,
the movie really kicks into gear. Church, Cooper and Jeong make a
tremendous comic team, and Kim Barker's script wisely sends them to cover
things that are actually funny, like the court battle over a baby born
with a third leg or a hostage standoff in an Old West tourist trap where
a professional Black Hat has started to take his job a little too seriously.
Church is hilarious, his Hartman so obsessed with swinging for the Anchor
Chair fences that his reports are filled with dramatic turns toward the
camera and ridiculous crocodile tears. I loved the relentless deadpan
with which he first keeps Mary around because he thinks it's funny and
then wants her around because her encyclopedic trivia and observant eye
actually become assets to their newscast. Cooper doesn't have much
to do, but his escalating paranoia is cute, and he nails a good speech
late in the game. I always like Jeong and his slow burn “I'm the
only sane man in this room!” act is a hoot. I also liked Jason Jones
as Hartman's shameless arch-rival from another network. Overall,
the movie aptly satirizes the cheerful shameless of modern cable news.
All the while, Qualls and Mixon make endearing companions on Mary's crazy
road trip.
The
movie's last third marks a fairly sharp tonal shift from the first hour,
but it works really well because it makes the characters confront the fact
that they treated Mary like crap and thought doing so was a hoot.
Of course, some viewers and critics are clearly thinking at that point
“What?!? She's a weirdo!” I suppose All About Steve
will work best for those viewers who see a little of themselves in a crazy,
desperate woman who's let society talk her out of who she is. You
know who you are. |
