Rumour Has It ... is a romantic comedy based on a nifty little premise. Too bad that nifty little premise gets buried in a movie that sucks so huge it’s like a giant black hole of suckage.
Here’s the deal: A young woman in Pasadena suspects that her family might have been the model for the novel and film known as The Graduate.
(In The Graduate, a young man is seduced by an older woman. He then falls for the woman’s daughter and crashes the daughter’s wedding to someone else and runs off with her. You remember: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross? Well, maybe not. It doesn’t matter.)
Jennifer Aniston plays Sarah, the woman who believes that those events happened to people in her family many years ago. This means her mom, now dead, and her grandma (Shirley MacLaine) may have both had affairs with a local guy. What’s more, mom’s affair seems to have happened just before she married Sarah’s father. Could Sarah’s biological dad be the lothario of The Graduate fame? Are you confused? Are you confused about things you don’t care about? Exactly.
Sarah is on her way home to Pasadena for her sister’s (Mena Suvari, wasted here) wedding. With Sarah is her fiance (Mark Ruffalo, wasted here).
Between grandmother and Aunt Mitzi (Kathy Bates, wasted here) she gets the name of the guy who allegedly had sex with both mom and grandmom.
She goes to visit him.
He is played by Kevin Costner. His character is sweet, charming, smart and rich. Sarah is attracted to him and vice versa, which is interesting, since all she does in the film is whine about finding herself.
Anyway, things happen of a romantic nature.
After that, Sarah’s sister freaks out. Her dad wigs out. Her fiance storms out. Her grandma acts out. We wanted to walk out at the stupidity of it all, but that’s not allowed. Good thing, too, or we wouldn’t have heard this bit of dialogue: “You’re the only person I can be myself with.” So that’s how you tell someone you love them! You let them know that it’s all about you!
The worst part of Rumour Has It is the way Aniston is shot, as if the whole movie were all about her pert little body. It’s actually creepy to watch, as if the director were stalking her with the camera. As well, the film is rife with weird edits and odd looping, so you can guess that something bad happened in the editing room or thereabouts, like, maybe someone noticed the story was nonexistent.
Something like that, anyway.
BOTTOM LINE
Kevin Costner and Shirley MacLaine are nice to look at, but this thing plays like a bad sitcom. Is ‘bad sitcom’ redundant?
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