2002 / 109 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

“Sweet Home Alabama” is one of those movies that seems to confuse pleasantness with actual entertainment. Sure, it’s nice enough. It’s cute and all. But does it really add up to anything? No. Not really.

Reese Witherspoon plays this woman named Melanie who appears to have it all. She has a job as some kind of fashion designer. She has a blandly handsome fiancée who happens to be the mayor of New York’s son. She has perfect bone structure and a gay, black, fashion-related friend. Ah, but she also has some skeletons in her closet. You see, she’s still married to her high school sweetheart (Josh Charles, the best thing about this movie) and she has neglected to tell everyone that she grew up in a Podunk Alabama town filled with the sort of eccentric goofballs Hollywood seems to think live in every town outside California.

So Reese goes back to this town in order to divorce the man she married so she can marry the dull man of her dreams in New York (sure, he’s a nice enough guy, but he ain’t very interesting). In the process, of course, she discovers that she misses her down home roots and there is no place like home and other homespun values inherent in a movie that takes its title from a Lynyrd Skynyrd song (coming soon: “That Smell- The Movie!”). If you’ve seen the trailer for this movie, you pretty much know what will happen at any given turn of the way. Of course she will discover that this town is better than New York. Of course she will stay with the man she left behind. Of course they will all dance to “Sweet Home Alabama” (TWICE, mind you!) at the end and everyone will smile.

The predictability of the whole thing wouldn’t be so bad if they had at least made an entertaining film. If they had decided to invest the film with realistic characters and situations that weren’t simply stock, they might have had something here. But, alas, they go the standard route of such a film. The Alabamians have all the quirks one might expect. Though some of them do manage to make something of their roles. Josh Charles does an admirable job as Reese’s husband, and Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place keep hope alive as Reese’s parents. But it’s just not enough. The film wanders from one scene to the next, forgetting to give any of them a point. She meets someone she once knew, they have a nice chat, and she seems to remember that she didn’t hate them after all. Then she meets someone else she once knew and the same thing happens all over again, and again, and again…for an hour and a half or so. Then there is the standard wedding that comes to a screeching halt when someone realizes that they love someone else. And there’s the big kiss at the end. And there is some nonsense about lightning striking twice.

This film fails in all the ways that “Legally Blonde” worked so well. “Legally Blonde” took a potentially one-joke premise and character and invested it with humanity and originality. It gave its basic idea multiple layers and made it come alive. “Sweet Home Alabama” could have been a refreshing meditation on one’s roots and the difference between city and rural people and worked in some good laughs. As it is, it’s not a terrible way to spend an hour and a half, but it evaporates from the mind the minute it’s over. It’s not a bad film. It’s just a generic one.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 27th, 2002 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.