Home Again

The com in the rom has always been the hard part. Romance is a serious business. Comedy trashes it. One believes in angels and desert islands and melting marshmallows and summer. The other believes that life is a farce and love is the wet rag that cleans up the mess on the floor.

Hollywood likes happy endings because they are more profitable than sadness and death. Realism is barred from rom-coms. What's left? Fantasy? Talking hamsters?

Alice is a mom and a interior decorator of limited (no) experience. She has two daughters, a teen and a waiting-to-be-teen. She is divorcing Austen, a music biz mover/shaker who's charm has passed its sell-by. She takes the kids to L.A, her old home town, if you can call it a town, from The Big Apple. It's a new something-or-other. A gesture (the kids think it sucks), perhaps.

Meanwhile, three likely lads who want to make movies and have ideas and an award winning short under their belts arrive in Tinseltown. They have nowhere to stay and end up in Alice's cottage at the bottom of her garden beyond the pool. How this happens is not worth talking about. Let's say party party party leading to a roll in the silk sheets followed by extreme embarrassment and mega hangovers.

The twentysomething boys are much nicer than they should be. Alice is 40 and not advertising the fact. As a sexy landlady she feels she should be more responsible. She has smart (expensively dressed) friends who talk about nothing in a sophisticated way.

Keep breathing. Stay with me. Movies like this won't kill you.

What is Reese Witherspoon doing here? That's a loaded question, safety catch off. No worries. Well... not yet.

"I'm just this little girl from Tennessee," she said. Once. Years ago. " I think a lot of things are out of your hands."

Maybe. Maybe not. For those who loved her in Pleasantville, Election, Legally Blonde and Wild won't forget that she won an Oscar playing June Carter in Walk The Line. The girl is not just a contender, she's gold dust. She deserves better.

Filling the space between paying the mortgage and finding something to do are Michael Sheen (Austen), Lake Bell (spoilt rich bitch) and Candice Bergen (Alice's mom). The boys are not as fun, nor as anarchic as those in Swingers. Only Pico Alexander as the self styled Lothario is so up himself he needs a cold shower every time he switches on the bedside light.

A rom-com is an oxymoron, like a dolphin who wants to be a DJ. It sends shivers down the back of the sofa.