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In Her Shoes October 3, 2005 |
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Ever since her breakout performances in “My Best Friend’s Wedding”, and “There’s Something About Mary”, nobody has been able to utilize Cameron Diaz the right way, and it has a lot to do with image. On one side, you’ve got this utterly famous, stunningly sexy babe, who is frequently in the celeb-rags jet-setting around the hot spots with her equally famous pop singer boyfriend, an image filled with vanity and the wrong kind of overexposure. On the other side, you’ve got a good actress, whose big eyes carry a weight of warmth and vulnerability behind the glamorous venire of her painters-perfection smile and knockout body. Too often she’s cast based on the former image, no doubt a product of poor managerial decision making and the ridiculously large checks stuff like “Charlie’s Angels” can bring to a famous name, and too infrequently is she given the chance to actually deliver poignant lines from a good script, or take direction from a seasoned veteran, but here it seems like she’s finally found the right project with “In Her Shoes”, a sweet and funny film that not only allows Diaz to stretch her acting talents, but do it looking every bit the beauty she is, be it in a thong and high heels, a revealing poolside bikini, or in pink nurses scrubs. It’s the kind of roll – that of an increasingly maturing, stubbornly selfish party girl – that garners respect from critics who’ve rarely given her just do, and it’s the kind of warm, crowd-pleasing semi-weeper that will get the attention of Chick Lit and In Touch devotees alike to sit up and realize that maybe the girl in those blurry paparazzi images, and bad mainstream comedies, is something beyond a famous name and a pretty build, but a charming, emotionally sound actress. Surely it helps to have Curtis Hanson directing you, and Toni Collette and Shirley MacLaine beside you in nearly every scene, but those are only load-bearing factors, this is as much Diaz’s show as it is anybody else’s, and she pulls it off magnificently. The embracing comedy stars Diaz and Collette as two very different Philadelphia sisters, best friends who need each other’s companionship, but secretly resent each other’s varied lifestyles. Maggie Feller (Diaz) is a drunken mess at the start of the picture, picking up strange men in nightclub restrooms, living the unfulfilling life of an undereducated party girl who gets by on her good looks and the forgiving nature of her father (Ken Howard), and increasingly frustrated sister Rose (Collette). Rose is Maggie’s complete opposite, a highly professional power lawyer with a spinster’s dating track record, resulting in a debilitating void in her life that miraculously changes when Jim (Richard Burgi from “Desperate Housewives”), a partner at her firm, suddenly takes an interest in her, sparking a jealousy in Maggie that eventually ends up with her in bed with Jim, and an estrangement from her bitter sister. That is only the first twenty minutes of the film, and hardly even scratches the surface of the sisters’ relationship, but it sets the stage for the rest of the picture, as Rose reevaluates her position in life (bored professional), quits her job and starts walking dogs for the rich (bohemian reawakening), as well as acquiring a too-good-to-be-true boyfriend (Mark Feuerstein) who idolizes the ground she walks on, while Maggie skips town to Florida where she tracks down her long-lost grandmother Ella (MacLaine), where many lessons in maturity and life are waiting to be learned. The script, adapted by Susannah Grant from Jennifer Weiner’s novel, does a good job of splitting time equally between Rose’s new Philadelphia life, which includes Sixers games and cheese steaks (like any normal Philadelphian should experience on a regular basis), and Maggie’s growing up in a Florida retirement village, where a job as a health care assistant gives her the opportunity to meet people at the end of life’s journey, an epiphany of sorts for a girl who has wasted most of her life in bars and bedrooms. “In Her Shoes”, which takes it’s title as part metaphor for Maggie’s personality change, by way of her relationship with her new grandmother, and from the shared love of high heels both sisters have, is a comedy that finds it’s laughs not in slapstick and goofy sight gags, like much of Diaz’s pervious films, but in quirky characters – especially the spirited elderly patrons of the retirement village – and semi-dramatic familial disputes. Ultimately, Rose and Maggie love each other, but the separation is key to their understanding both of life’s vast opportunities, and to their own needs of independence and freedom from routine, which doesn’t completely sever the bond between sisters, but creates a healthy amount of breathing room. Hanson, who is capable of shifting genres at ease, from old-school film noir (his masterpiece “L.A. Confidential”), to rap-infused proletarian biography (Eminem’s “8 Mile”), directs this largely female-centric story with the same kind of visual sophistication and tenderness he brought to the Pittsburgh-set “Wonder Boys”, and much like that great collegiate dramedy, “In Her Shoes” deftly balances a story of redemption and spiritual growth with much emotion and levity. Collette and MacLaine are terrific as Maggie’s stern, yet accepting crutches, and supporting turns by Feuerstein, Howard, Burgi, Norman Lloyd, and Jerry Adler prove that the men in the picture are hardly second fiddle to the talented female leads, but there’s a reason Diaz is top-billed, and even though an argument can be made that Collette’s Rose is the more important character, Diaz’s Maggie elicits more of an emotional response, and her redemption is more welcome. In one early scene, she auditions for a veejay job at MTV and is thoroughly embarrassed when her poor reading skills can’t keep up with the fast moving teleprompter, and Diaz tosses off the difficult scene with a kind of heartbreaking humility, and from then on, it’s her film to lose. She never does, and “In Her Shoes” benefits mightily for it, as an actress finally finds her given groove, in a superior comedy of sisterly devotion, frustration, and life’s bountiful second chances. “In Her Shoes” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf |