Film Review--New in Town

New In Town
directed by Jonas Elmer
written by Ken Rance and C. Jay Cox
starring Renée Zellweger, Harry Connick, Jr., Siobhan Fallon, J. K. Simmons, Frances Conroy, Mike O’Brien, Ferron Guerreiro

This fish out of water tale is charmingly rendered despite being wholly predictable and hackneyed.

Renée Zellweger plays Lucy Hill, a consultant for a major cooperation, who agrees to travel from Miami to Minnesota to streamline a plant so they can start making power bars. Naturally, she does not readily take to the climate and is viewed by a nuisance by most of the employees at the factory. The film tracks her transformation into something more useful to the locals as well as her budding romance with the union representative, Ted Mitchell (Connick, Jr.).

Much of the film deals with Lucy’s discomfort and her adjustment to the earnestness of the community who gradually warm to her after a fashion. Her first meeting with Ted ends with her insulting him and reducing him to a red neck stereotype. She’s forced to eat crow when Ted visits her office the following morning and begins to address the union’s concerns. Hanging over everything is the fact that the cooperation wants to lose half the employees which Lucy finds difficult to implement. So there is tension which explodes when the order comes down that the plant will be closed. Then a set of circumstances that are truly obvious unravel and Lucy magically saves the plant and everyone’s job.

Lucy is a haughty bitch who looks downward from her lofty perch at the simpletons who make up the small community in which she is unceremoniously thrust. Naturally, she learns the error of her ways and comes to appreciate the townsfolk for what they are. There are numerous scenes where Lucy is forced to deal with life as it is lived for these regular people who are all tied to the plant in some fashion or another. Her romance with Ted is predictable and not particularly satisfying. It’s just a plot device that these sort of film always necessitate. Lucy is completed only with a man as her rabid climb to the top of the corporate ladder is deemed to reflect badly on her character. What is important here are the values of small time America against the tyrannical and systematic evil as represented by the corporations who reduce people to statistical data that can easily be shifted around without feeling.

The film is focused on a romance that doesn’t come across as particularly stimulating in the final analysis. It’s generic and unenergetic. The chemistry between the leads just isn’t apparent and their scenes together lack any discernible vitality. Still, they are intensely investigated to appease an audience that requires such relationships when they bother to drag themselves out to see a film of this nature. Regardless, the end result is a film that plays cold despite the attempt to heat things up against the bitter cold landscape.

The citizens of the small town are all an exceedingly eccentric lot which most likely isn’t very close to the truth about how such people actually live. It’s an exaggeration that does manage to provide the film with a certain amount of charm because they are depicted as essentially hard working, goodly folks with big hearts and weird, odd ways. They appear as a counterbalance to the uppity, life-draining mien of Lucy and her smarty-pants attitude regarding her new home. The film deals with her transformation and gradual acceptance of the locals as real people with real feelings. It’s a tired but true approach to such situations and for the most part they fail to elicit a terrible amount of sympathy throughout this film. Lucy remains as skittish and shy as she came only she’s got results to prove she’s important and worthy of the next step up the ladder to oblivion.

The use of absolute cold is a fine metaphor for the deep freeze that originally exists between Lucy and the rest of the town when she makes her unwanted appearance. It doesn’t help that she fires Stu Kopenhafer the foreman (Simmons) and keeps a long list of others who she has deemed worthy to be axed.

Renée Zellweger manages to convey her character’s transformation from blase iciness to blind acceptance rather effortlessly. She’s particularly good at playing confused and down which is necessary for Lucy to survive her essential conundrum. Lucy’s mocking of religion which plays such a vital role in the lives of the community, she cannot relate to the trials that afflict hard working folks every day as they attempt to keep their head above the line. She’s been ensconced in her safe, easy life for so long that she no longer knows what it’s like to stare down the barrel of a gun facing the blistering attack of deprivation and terrible loss. Harry Connick, Jr. plays a scruffy, dirty, yet genuinely true man who rescues Lucy from herself. Ted is a character who is easy to draw because his role in the film is so readily recognizable. He comes in to remind the audience of what is missing from the main character’s life and to strip away all of her conceits toward making it in the man’s world of corporate America. The message is that a woman cannot be complete without a man and that a high paying position is trumped by emotional attachments.

Blanche (Fallon) is a particular piece of work. The character is an extreme example of the small town matron who keeps everyone together. She’s the heart of the town and is consumed with a very real tendency toward maintaining order through her locally famous tapioca pudding. It’s something of an obsession with her as she metes it out on every conceivable occasion. Fallon plays her with an earnestness that is admirable. Blanche is representative of the kind of woman who lives in every small town. She is Jesus-fearing and connected to the town in a manner that is almost terminal. She is not impressed by Lucy’s hifalutin lifestyle and maintains her integrity throughout. Stu is a man who has found something he is clearly able to be master of and his firing seems particularly egregious in the overall context of the film. He’s just the man you want on the job and strikes me as someone who you want on your side when the flames are lapping at your ankles. J. K. Simmons plays him with the quiet authority that comes through years of experience doing something of merit. Trudy Van Uuden is the town busy body and Frances Conroy plays her with a terrific comedic edge. She’s a bit ridiculous but entirely endearing.

Overall, this film presents a mediocre and familiar story that does not dazzle or shine. It’s easily digestible and subsequently forgettable although there are some performances that stick out for their overall weirdness. Siobhan Fallon is particularly fine as a woman with an enormous heart who lives accordance to principles that have seen her through many struggles throughout her life. She’s a character who is worth getting to know and Fallon captures Blanche’s core gentleness and true longing to do right by other people. She’s human and greatly vulnerable and it’s sometimes heartbreaking to look into her eyes as there is a hint of loss that is belied by her effervescent manner. Most of the other characters are not so memorable and are so familiar they are ultimately taken for granted and easily disposed of.