|
Something like it isn't close enough
Is Life or Something Like It a fluffy romance, a dark comedy or, like, something else? Whichever it is, it doesn't work very well.
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 25, 2002
Lanie Kerigan nearly has it all: great job, great boyfriend, great body, everything that Hollywood regularly pins down as what women want. What Lanie needs is a movie that can convince her there's something better out there while entertaining an audience.
 |
[Twentieth Century Fox]
Reporter Lanie Kerigan (Angelina Jolie) shares a discordant moment with her cameraman Pete (Edward Burns) in Life or Something Like It.
|
Life or Something Like It isn't that movie. It's a curious film that can't decide whether it wants to be a frothy romantic comedy, the kind spinning on some fateful twist that never happens to anyone in real life, or a profound drama of personal discovery. Director Stephen Herek can't have it both ways, any more than Lanie can. It's hard to tell which identity crisis is more wasteful, hers or the movie's.
Angelina Jolie goes blond as Lanie, one of those happy-talk TV reporters always putting a smile on insignificance. Everything is looking up. A network is considering her for a morning show gig, her lover shines for the Seattle Mariners, and finding time at the gym is apparently no problem. Then an assignment sends Lanie and the film into a darker, although not daring, direction.
An interview with a homeless sage named Prophet Jack (Tony Shalhoub) is supposed to be a fun piece predicting a football score. But Jack tosses in a kicker: Lanie will die next Thursday.
Everything that occurs to that point -- especially Lanie's "I-hate-you-no-I-don't" banter with her cameraman Pete (Edward Burns) -- suggests Lanie will work through her crisis with the kind of plucky allure that pulled Meg, Julia and Sandra through comparable movie scrapes before. Fantasy, however, takes a hard turn toward reality, yet constantly drifts back. The result is a movie that can't make us laugh or cry when it wants to because we can't tell what it wants at any particular time.
Sure, Lanie decides to throw caution to the wind as her doomsday approaches. But the manner she uses, becoming the antithesis of a TV reporter, wouldn't get the reaction the screenplay offers. Life or Something Like It always trips on the fine line between what viewers believe and what they'll allow themselves to buy into for two hours. Resorting to an obviously tacked-on epilogue, when each previous problem disappears without reasoning, is a shallow attempt to smooth over the plot holes and deadly dull scenes.
It's nice to see Jolie loosen up a bit, letting some of that rowdy side we read about in the tabloids emerge on screen. You can spot the scenes that probably attracted her to the script: a batting practice therapy session when Lanie sees through her boyfriend and a probing interview with the kind of hard-bitten woman (Stockard Channing) that Lanie could turn out to be. Jolie is game for anything, but Herek keeps changing the rules, injecting sight gags into serious moments and making mortality seem trivial.
There aren't even any sparks between Jolie and Burns, who proves again to be the ineffective placebo of romantic chemistry. Channing is good in her steely role, but she shows up once early to establish her Barbara Walters-style occupation, then doesn't appear again until a point at which we're expected to know how tough and self-centered she is without our having been presented with the evidence.
Life or Something Like It is by turns a clump of fluff, a Fisher King kind of fable and a countdown to tragedy, yet it doesn't do any of those things particularly well. Twists that are supposed to be telling seem made up on the spot. Herek's film drastically needs consistency, or something like it.
Life or Something Like It
- Grade: C
- Director: Stephen Herek
- Cast: Angelina Jolie, Edward Burns, Stockard Channing, Melissa Errico
- Screenplay: John Scott Shepherd, Dana Stephens
- Rating: PG-13; profanity, sexual situations
- Running time: 105 min.
Back to Weekend
© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111
|
