New In Town by Director Jonas Elmer
Renée Zellweger Stars With Harry Connick, Jr., in This Poor Comedy
New In Town feigns to tell the story of a Miami corporate, status-hungry woman’s awakening to the possible satisfying wholeness of small-town life. Renée Zellweger plays Lucy Hill, and Harry Connick, Jr., plays her nemesis-cum-love interest, Ted Mitchell.
Setting Up Characters
In the first few minutes, Hill is at home in Miami, rushing to work from her gorgeous beachside all glass and white house. She is wearing stiletto shoes and a too-tight skirt suit, and her face looks taut. She arrives late to a board meeting where she is the only female, and her jerky, maybe misogynistic, co-workers quickly assign the project they have been discussing to her. Because “Lucy’s single” and has no family obligations, she is told to get on the next plane for Minnesota to personally oversee the massive down-sizing of one of her company’s many food manufacturing plants.
Renée Zellweger Plays Tough Businesswoman
The first major mistake of the film is the next scene. Hill arrives at the Minnesota Airport in the middle of a snowstorm improperly dressed in another skirt suit and pair of stilettos, and is shocked to discover how cold it is outside. The woman set up in the previous scenes is successful, smart and tough—she has risen to a high level at a male-dominated corporation, has bought herself a beautiful, stylish house, and has studied fashion magazines and implemented their suggestions to keep up with current trends. This character is a perfectionist and a control freak, and would never, ever be caught by surprise by something like bad winter weather in the Midwest.
Cliché View of Minnesota
Next, the film cuts to a group of local women sitting around a kitchen table gossiping. The room is a perfect representation of the cozy hick home we know from movies past, and the women are like poorly written, un-ironic versions of the characters from Fargo. They speak with heavy accents and repeat phrases like, “don’tcha know” and “you bet-cha,” without supplementing them with insight or humor, so consistently in the first sixty seconds of the scene that they immediately establish themselves as nosy, unsympathetic fools.
Lucy gets a rental car and drives to the realtors’ office, where she encounters the women from the kitchen scene for the first time. They find her clothes and lack of religion alien-like and she finds their scrap-booking bizarrely sentimental and earnest. Over the next hour or so, Lucy grows to care about these towns-people and develops a crush on Connick’s character Ted Mitchell, the union leader heading worker opposition to Hill’s downsizing project.
Moving New In Town Forward
Attitude-changing scenes for Lucy Hill include one where she gets trapped in her car off the road in a snow bank for hours and has to be rescued by Ted, and one where she attends an annual tree lighting ceremony and feels, probably for the first time, the joy of community. These scenes would have been fine, except that by the time they come around the audience has lost its ability to believe, or to feel moved, by these characters who have been so thoroughly set up as jokes in previous scenes.
Harry Connick, Jr., Performs Well
Harry Connick, Jr., gives the best performance of the film, as a thoughtful widower from North Carolina, but his character is just likeable, not stunning, and he is not nearly enough to redeem the movie. Renée Zellweger has proven herself to be a very good comic actor in films like Nurse Betty and Bridget Jones’ Diary, and her participation in this very bad movie is disappointing.
New in Town was written by Ken Rance and C. Jay Cox and directed by Jonas Elmer.
Winter On The Plains
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Winter On The Plains
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