"New in Town" Movie Review

Rene Zellweger, what are you doing -- and why?

You can't handle, and are not constituted to portray, this kind of role in "New in Town."

In ever-more-absurdist Hollywood tradition, here goes yet another of those wearisome long-hackneyed cliches about how city slickers are bad and small town hicks are all wonderful. It might even have settled in as a tolerably sweet confection with a less effusive star, although why any would sign on to this automatic setback to their career is unclear.

Granted, given how big city folks are raised and how unpretentious, low-pressure small towners have lived, there's surely a lot of truth in that hypothesis, why does it always seem to come out the same on the screen? Or even degraded.

The eventual romance is actually not all that bad, with Connick better than Zellweger at making it work. Trouble is, she had blasted off at such a high level of irritating shrill and grating energy that her eventual adjustment to hick society feels almost satirical. There's no laughs for awhile as Zellweger, in a caricatured stiffness, struggles to make her character credible. (Like, OK, OK, we got it!)

The alleged charm of the small town folk might have come through without all the endless homilies and the gratuitous holiday stuff -- Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day, y'know -- which offers them as shamelessly inserted stereotypes who talk with awkwardly contrived Accents.

We have, unnoticed by the screenwriters, entered into a cinema era in which audiences expect something beyond old-time, superficial appearances. Everything about this movie needs renovating, especially, Zellweger's character's growth of understanding into the goodness of the townsfolk, which happens here all too fast and mostly attached to the holiday events.

Redeeming features? Well, yeah, Connick is actually pretty good. No real complaints there. You kind of attach yourself to him because he's the only sign of intelligent scripting here.

Laughs? Hardly. Unless you find Zellweger in a hunting outfit frustrated in not being able to perform a natural function due to a stuck zipper funny.

So the plot. Executive Lucy Hill (Renee Zellweger), a high-powered get-it-done consultant with a Miami corporation, has just been assigned to go from her dream Miami lifestyle to the worst location she can imagine: the tiny town of New Ulm, Minnesota. Seems her company needs serious restructuring of their blue collar manufacturing plant there.

Not surprisingly, the locals are not particularly welcoming of her either. And the roads? Icy. The weather, frigid beyond belief.

No, Lucy doesn't want anything to do with attaching herself in any way to this town. All she wants is to finish her assignment fast and get out. But now she meets Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick Jr.), a beer-loving pick-up truck devotee who brings a disarming charm to everyday happenings, like sliding off the road into a ditch and other folksy antics. Darn, but she's actually warming up to this town and its friendly, heartfelt people. And to romance.

So, anyway, now she gets word from her company headquarters in Miami that a decision has been made to close down this plant entirely. With Lucy's heart now so ingrained in the soul of the town, she can't let that happen.

Here goes one of the fastest disappearing acts of the season.

"New in Town" (quality rating: 4 out of 10)
Director: Jonas Elmer
Screenplay: Ken Rance, C. Jay Cox
Cast: Renee Zellweger, Harry Connick, Jr.
Time: 1 hr., 36 min.
Rating: PG (vulgarity, some sex references)