My Super Ex-Girlfriend
Yesterday, I saw My Super Ex-Girlfriend. I had a ball, but, for once, I more or less agree with Times film critic Manohla Dargis.
How hard and often you laugh will probably hinge on a host of other variables, like your appreciation for a cast that includes Eddie Izzard as the villainous Professor Bedlam, as well as your tolerance for junky-looking cinematography and Mr. Reitman’s cheerfully slapdash direction.
I didn't think that the cinematography was all that bad; I thought it was absolutely standard. Uma Thurman certainly looked great. She looked a lot of things, actually; much of the interest of the film lies in her Protean visage, which can pass from "serene goddess" to "Elaine May neurotic" in the blink of an eye. It's this unpredictability, in fact, that prompts your back brain to believe that her Jenny Johnson really is endowed with G Girl powers.
Actually, all of the interest of this picture lies in its cast. Without them, its many funny bits would be annoying. As in The Lake House, we're served material that would be inedibly stale if gifted, intelligent actors weren't fully inhabiting their parts. Just as Sandra Bullock' ability to sigh with an earnestness that makes questioning the physics of a time-traveling correspondence seem hugely beside the point is absolutely essential to keep that very point out of the film's way, so it is with Uma Thurman's busy face. My Super Ex-Girlfriend may not be Ms Thurman's most important film, but even Shakespeare wouldn't give her a more comprehensive chance to show off her chops. She is helped (as Ms Bullock is helped by her leading man) by Luke Wilson's firm inhabitation of his stock persona, the slightly-above-average nice-guy-but-still-a-guy. Add a group of committed supporting actors - Anna Faris, Rainn Wilson, and Eddie Izzard (and let's not forget Wanda Sykes!) - and you've got an ensemble that only a truly botched screenplay could smother. Even Teddy Castelucci's deliriously bombastic score, which seems to have been written for some other kind of movie, can't spoil the fun.
Trust me when I say that questions raised by the trailer are all quite neatly, even ingeniously solved. I don't think you'll see the solution coming, but if you do, you'll just be more relaxed about enjoying the show. After all, what we have here is a heroine, or perhaps a "heroine," who confesses that it was because she "knew" that her boyfriend would come back to her that she didn't kill him. Sounds like something a spider might say - at least until you remember the things that she did do to him. Are men right to fear strong and capable women? Are superpowers unsuited to volatile female nature? (Ask that question in the wrong bar, and you'll get your clock cleaned.) Let's just say that My Super Ex-Girlfriend gives a delightful new twist to the meaning of "left holding the bag."
Visually, My Super Ex-Girlfriend behaves like a stretch limo of prom-goers in from Merrick, Long Island, for the night. It cannot get enough of Manhattan. This is where Mr Castelucci's music is particularly fatuous: the producers seem to be glorying in the city not as it exists but as something that they thought up all by themselves. New York! New York! The movie could have taken place anywhere, but recent evidence suggests that Chicago is reserved for utterly realistic romances, while, in LA, nobody ever really connects. San Francisco's film commission requires car chases, and if you haven't got an ethnic-conflict angle you won't be welcome in Boston. And, as The Wedding Crashers showed once and for all, Washington is a party town. I'm convinced that most Americans don't believe that New York City really exists, even when they're crossing Times Square after dark or sagging on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That unbelievable city has never been more adoringly captured on film. All it needs is Tinkerbelle. Come to think of it, Ms Thurman does a pretty good job of updating the Tinkerbelle concept.
