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Film review

Rumor Has It ...: Filmflam

Rob Reiner's latest film starts with a promising premise but quickly turns conventional and disappointingly mediocre.

By PHILIP BOOTH
Published December 25, 2005

[Photo: Warner Bros.]

Kevin Costner, with Jennifer Aniston, is perfectly cast as a laid-back dot-com billionaire.

Hollywood suffers from a general lack of "extravagant ambition," resulting in too few real masterpieces or disasters, but an endless supply of middling, reasonably well-crafted films, New York Times critic A.O. Scott suggested in a recent column.

Rumor Has It . . ., the latest misfire from once-deft comic director Rob Reiner (When Harry Met Sally, This Is Spinal Tap), could be Exhibit A in that argument. It's built on a novel premise: A young woman suspects that her family may have inspired the events in the 1967 film classic The Graduate. Reiner's film, penned by Ted Griffin (Matchstick Men, Ocean's Eleven) nevertheless comes off as stunningly average: neither smart enough to leave a lasting impression nor dumb enough to count as a bomb. The chuckles are few, and the contrived situations are many. The date movie crowd will eat it up.

Jennifer Aniston, delivering yet another variation on the sweetly neurotic character she played on television's Friends, is Sarah, the troubled New York newspaper obits and weddings writer at the center of the story.

Back home in Pasadena for the wedding of her impossibly bouncy, blond, all-American sister (Mena Suvari), Sarah admits to being terrified by her own impending union to nice-guy lawyer Jeff (Mark Ruffalo), who's also on hand for the nuptials.

Because the plot demands it, Sarah begins to get the sneaking suspicion that her sassy grandmother (Shirley MacLaine) is the Mrs. Robinson character of The Graduate, who inadvertently shared a young lover with her own daughter, Sarah's late mother. MacLaine, as per her usual late-career work, is all shtick with no place for her character to go.

The trail leads to Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner), an old acquaintance of Sarah's parents. Costner is perfectly cast as a laid-back Internet billionaire whose streamlined personal philosophy - "Be present," a variation on the '60s-era "Be here now" - paves the way for a sexual encounter.

Once the mystery is solved, Rumor Has It . . . turns into a conventional romantic comedy. It's possible that Sarah could conquer her anxiety and settle down with Jeff, or maybe she will pursue another interest. A semblance of an interesting subplot springs up from nowhere near the end of the film, when Beau and Sarah both admit to a lifelong obsession with the past, in the form of her mother. "Maybe we're both just chasing ghosts," she says.

The same could be said about Reiner and Griffin: They're chasing the spirit of The Graduate and, just maybe, besmirching its memory.

Grade: C

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Costner, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Ruffalo, Richard Jenkins

Rating: PG-13; sexual situations, crude humor

Running time: 96 min.

[Last modified December 22, 2005, 11:52:04]