Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2011 by Roger Ebert

Author:Roger Ebert
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Film
ISBN: 9781449406189
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing LLC
Published: 2011-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

N

New in Town

PG, 96 m., 2009

Renee Zellweger (Lucy Hill), Harry Connick Jr. (Ted Mitchell), J. K. Simmons (Stu Kopenhafer), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (Blanche Gunderson), Frances Conroy (Trudy Van Uuden). Directed by Jonas Elmer and produced by Paul Brooks, Darryl Taja, Tracey Edmonds, and Peter Safran. Screenplay by Kenneth Rance and C. Jay Cox.

We open on a gathering of the Scrappers Club, four women around a kitchen table pasting things into scrapbooks. The moment we hear one of them talking, we’re not too surprised to find her name is Blanche Gunderson. Her sister Marge, the trooper, must have been the ambitious one. Not that Blanche isn’t, just that she’s relentlessly nice.

So are most of the folks in the small town of New Ulm, Minnesota, which is so cold in the winter that scrapping warms you up. Old Ulm (I know you were wondering) is the town on the Danube where Einstein was born. To this frigid outpost flies Lucy Hill, a high-powered exec from Miami, whose mission is to downsize the local food products plant more or less out of existence.

Lucy is the cute-as-a-button Renee Zellweger, so we know she’s only kidding when she pretends to be a heartless rhymes-with-witch who hammers around on her stiletto heels and won’t smile. That doesn’t scare Blanche (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), Lucy’s assistant, who invites her home for dinner (ldquo;We’re only havin’ meat loaf”). So uncannily does her accent resemble Marge in Fargo that I was trying to remember where I had heard it recently, doncha know?

The extra man at Blanche’s table turns out to be Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick Jr.), the widowed dad of a thirteen-year-old girl, whom Blanche obviously thinks would be a great match for Lucy. That Ted, the union guy at the plant Lucy plans to downsize, is perhaps not a perfect match never even occurs to Blanche, who like all Minnesotans and most Dakotans, is just plain nice. I mean that. I’ve been to Fargo. You should go sometime.

Ted doesn’t seem nice at first, but then, jeez, he’s originally from out of town, y’know. Ted and Lucy get in such a fight at the table that they both stalk out, which means they miss out on Blanche’s famous tapioca pudding. Glossary Rule: Whenever a recipe is much discussed in the first act, it will be tasted in the third.

So firmly do we believe Lucy is visiting relatives of the Fargo cast that it’s a surprise to learn New in Town was actually filmed in Winnipeg, which here looks nothing like the glittering metropolis in Guy Maddin’s masterpiece. New Ulm consists of some houses, a VFW hall with a Friday fish fry, the food plant, and not a whole lot else except snow. But the people are friendly, hardworking, and proud of their plant, and soon Lucy softens, begins to like them, and reveals she was Renee Zellweger all along.

Because this is a romcom with no ambition in the direction of originality, Lucy is single, and Ted is the only eligible unmarried man in the cast, so do the math.

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