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Alex and Emma
PG-13
Starts tomorrow at area theaters
Three reels out of four
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Alex and Emma is the kind of romantic comedy Hollywood doesn’t make anymore. It’s intelligent and funny, and never resorts to manipulation for the cheap laughs.
That means it will make about $12 at the box office.
Alex is a successful writer with a serious problem on his hands: He must pay loansharks 100 grand within 30 days or face a one-way trip to the pavement, courtesy of his creditors. The only way he can come up with the money is to deliver his next book to his publisher. And since Alex is having a serious case of writer’s block, he’s up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
Enter Emma, a temp stenographer whose mind is almost as fast as her fingers. With Emma’s help, Alex writes the novel he always knew he had in him. What he didn’t expect was to find love again.
It’s nice to see Rob Reiner back in form. The man almost single-handedly resurrected the romantic comedy with When Harry Met Sally and raised the bar higher with the timeless An American President.
Alex and Emma is loosely based on the story behind Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short novel The Gambler — except, in the Russian novelist’s case, he faced the prospect of losing the past and future rights to all of his works. Like Alex, he found love and finished his novel.
The movie benefits greatly from the casting of Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson as the leads. Wilson, like the bastard child of Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart, has an air of educated bumpkin about him. Hudson gives a wonderfully subtle yet very intelligent performance as Emma. The two have an easygoing chemistry that never beats you over the head.
Hudson also gets to show her wacky side as she plays several smaller characters to humorous effect. You can definitely see her bloodline — she’s Goldie Hawn’s daughter, after all — at work.
The film’s weakness is the lack of real dramatic tension. Even in romantic comedies, there must be a point where you believe these two people who are obviously meant for each other might never get together. And the big payoff, when it comes, seems a little out of character with the rest of the movie.
But this is offset by the fact that Alex and Emma operates on a more cerebral level than most romantic comedies. In fact, the script (written by Andrew Scheinman, Adam Scheinman, Jeremy Leven and Reiner himself) sometimes has the feeling of a play. The device of switching between Alex and Emma and the characters in Alex’s book works very nicely and gives an almost madcap dimension to the movie.
Despite some minor shortcomings, Alex and Emma is a charming and unique production.
Punch Drunk Love
R
Available Tuesday
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I don’t know what was more amazing: finding Adam Sandler can actually act, or realizing he was playing the same character he always plays — but in a much better movie. In a masterpiece of nontraditional casting, Paul Thomas Anderson directs Happy Gilmore himself in this totally loopy yet sweet tale of a loser who finds love. Sandler plays Barry Egan, a shy businessman with serious anger issues. When Barry calls a phone sex line, this puts in motion a series of events that changes his life forever. The great supporting cast includes Emily Watson and Anderson regular Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
