Movie Reviews

Movie Reviews: New in Town

Whether New in Town has more contempt for women, Midwesterners, blue-collar workers, or the soulless corporations that exploit them could be debated, but the movie definitely doesn't think much of its audience.

Renee Zellweger stars as a snooty workaholic Miami exec with no visible personal life. She is dispatched by the heartless bigwigs at HQ to supervise a downsizing makeover at one of the company's small-town plants. It turns out to be staffed by the kind of unsophisticated, fundamentalist-Christian rubes that Hollywood thinks populate all of the flyover states (Minnesota, in this case). On Zellweger's first night in town, one of them asks her if she has found Jesus, which is always good for a laugh.

Not that Zellweger herself is presented as being much more intelligent than the heartland hoi polloi. When she steps out of the airport upon arrival in snowy Minnesota, she is shocked to discover that the weather is cold. She says she knows how to start a fire in her fireplace, but appears dumbfounded when she can't locate its on/off switch. Later, she has trouble using a zipper. With company higher-ups like this, no wonder America is hurtling toward a new Depression.

The chatty hinterlands hen who serves as Zellweger's secretary (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) invites her home to dinner on her first night in town. Zellweger gets into an argument there with the plant's union steward (Harry Connick Jr.) that is so scorched-earth insulting you just know the two are destined to have more than labor-management relations. Just once in these movies, don't you wish that attractive people who feel loathing at first sight would avoid the "enemies-attract" cliché?

Overprotective single hockey-dad Connick prohibits his teenage daughter (Ferron Guerreiro) from listening to immoral pop music (country only, please), wearing makeup, dressing like a girl, or taking baths with her clothes off. (Okay, I made up that last one.) This leads to a girly bonding opportunity when Zellweger spirits the daughter away to the big city for a shopping spree. Amazingly, we are spared the usual makeover montage and multiple-outfit slideshow.

Defying all logic, Zellweger ends up staying in the frozen north for weeks without doing much of anything to justify her presence. Although she draws up a list of layoff candidates, she fires only a cartoonishly gruff manager who takes advantage of her gullibility (J.K. Simmons)—and even he gets hired back. The list only exists as a prop for her secretary to find and get upset about after Zellweger and the local yokels have become friends. Don't worry, they soon are back to doing things like playfully flinging handfuls of yogurt at each other on the factory floor.

The most frustrating thing about the plot is its totally wrongheaded ending. Without spoiling the specifics, the climax should have been a celebration of "workers control the means of production" solidarity. But the timing of what we are supposed to applaud as Zellweger's stroke of genius is actually pretty atrocious. The plant's employees would have had a much sweeter deal if they had thrown off the chains of their evil corporate masters a little earlier, back when those undeserving overlords regarded the plant as worthless.

Even at the movies, a working man just can't get a break.

—James Dawson
01.30.09