Movie Review:My One and Only (2009)

Movie Review:My One and Only (2009)

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: August 21, 2009

In “My One and Only,” a good-natured screwball road film set in 1953, Renée Zellweger plays Ann Devereaux, a fading Southern belle who drags along her two teenage boys on a nationwide husband-hunting expedition. Crinkling her eyes, smiling coyly and perambulating with seductive flounces, Ann could be a cousin of Blanche DuBois. She belongs to a breed of aggressively glamorous women whose syrupy wiles modern feminism has rendered quaint, and Ms. Zellweger inhabits her fully.

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The journey begins when Ann returns to the New York apartment she shares with her husband, Dan (Kevin Bacon), a handsome society bandleader, and catches him in flagrante delicto with another woman. Mr. Bacon’s suave lothario, with his lascivious grin, is instantly recognizable as the kind of reptilian ladies’ man who just can’t help himself.

Stomping out of the house, Ann empties a safe deposit box; scoops up her sons, George (Logan Lerman) and Robbie (Mark Rendall), who are half-brothers; and, in a baby-blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville paid for in cash, embarks on a trip that takes them from New York to Los Angeles, with stops in Boston, Pittsburgh and St. Louis.

The movie, directed by Richard Loncraine from a screenplay by Charlie Peters, is a fictionalized account of incidents in the early life of the actor George Hamilton. As embodied by Mr. Lerman, the 15-year-old George, who narrates the movie, is an earnest aspiring writer who bears some physical resemblance to the oleaginous charmer Mr. Hamilton later became, minus the famous suntan.

Slender, curly-headed Robbie is an effeminate, fashion-obsessed mama’s boy with Hollywood stars in his eyes who dwells in a cocoon of innocence. The homophobic insults lobbed by strangers encountered during the trip go over his head.

The film’s wistfully jaunty tone is established by an elaborate title sequence of vintage radio and magazine ads. “My One and Only” aspires to be a contemporary version of a Preston Sturges comedy. But for all its charm, this lighthearted travelogue is less an inquiry into the soul of America than an affectionate period piece set in economically leaner times, decades before communications technology revolutionized the concept of personal space. The movie conveys an older notion of the country as a land of open roads where you can thumb a ride: a place where you can still get romantically lost and found.

As Ann visits old beaus and meets new ones, each more pathetic than the last, “My One and Only” coheres as a series of amusing, loosely connected character sketches. Ann’s first candidate for savior, Wallace (Steven Weber), is a Boston businessman in dire financial straits who rifles through her purse in a hotel restaurant and disappears while she is powdering her nose.

The second, Harlan (Chris Noth), an Army doctor, is an anti-Communist zealot who intimidates George with his authoritarian attitude. Her reunion in Pittsburgh with Charlie (Eric McCormack), a rich former beau with a young girlfriend, gives Ann the first inkling that her shelf life as a beauty at whose feet men fall helplessly besotted may have expired. A friendly overture to a stranger in a hotel bar gets her arrested for solicitation.

In need of cash, Ann takes a job at a paint store, where her charm draws business and lands her the attention of its wealthy owner, Bill (David Koechner), a serial bigamist and crackpot. The movie’s wittiest speech is Bill’s lecture to George about how the fluctuating body temperature of women necessitates bringing a sweater to every date. In another moneymaking scheme — transporting hitchhikers for cash — Ann and her sons are robbed at gunpoint.

George eventually loses patience with his mother and remains for a while in the spartan house of Ann’s penny-pinching, desperately jealous sister, Hope (Robin Weigert). All the while, he longs to return to New York, where he eventually ends up leaving a class speechless with his account of how he spent his summer vacation.

A half-century ago a regular feature of Reader’s Digest was the series “My Most Unforgettable Character,” whose contributors reminisced about larger-than-life personalities who had crossed their paths. “My One and Only” includes about a dozen worthy candidates.

“My One and Only” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It includes mild sexual situations.

MY ONE AND ONLY

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Richard Loncraine; written by Charlie Peters; director of photography, Marco Pontecorvo; edited by Humphrey Dixon; music by Mark Isham; production designer, Brian Morris; produced by Aaron Ryder and Norton Herrick; released by Herrick Entertainment. In Manhattan at the Paris Theater, 4 West 58th Street, at Fifth Avenue. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

WITH: Renée Zellweger (Ann Devereaux), Kevin Bacon (Dan Devereaux), Logan Lerman (George), Mark Rendall (Robbie), Chris Noth (Dr. Harlan Williams), Steven Weber (Wallace), Eric McCormack (Charlie), Robin Weigert (Hope) and David Koechner (Bill).


via:http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/movies/21myone.html