Wrongly advertised as a romantic comedy, Sweet November is really a four-hankie weeper loaded down with bad jokes.
Worse, the movie is just awful.
Besides the cloying plot and melodramatic dialogue -- a lot of which is so obvious that audiences shout it out before the actors mouth the words -- the acting is wretched.
Keanu Reeves is in zombie land as the callow leading man. Playing a hotshot ad agency whiz who is reaching career and personal burnout in San Francisco, Reeves has his life transformed by a hippie-dippie woman who invites him to move in for a month as her 'November' reclamation project. The sex is free.
Reeves was dull enough as the scab quarterback in The Replacements last summer, but in comparison with this stumblebum performance, that one was Oscar material.
Reeves may also be losing his heartthrob hunk appeal. According to a female friend, Reeves, who looks a little pasty-faced and dull in the eyes in the new movie, is not aging well.
Meanwhile, Charlize Theron is just too cute for her own good as the 'funny' femme with the horrible secret that turns Sweet November into an obnoxious soap opera.
Theron bounces off walls for half the movie and then falls into a deep funk for the rest.
Wasted support players include Jason Isaacs (the villainous nemesis for Mel Gibson in The Patriot). He shows up as a freak friend to Theron. An ad exec by day, he is a transvestite by night, for no particular reason other than to shock Reeves.
Greg Germann (the snarky lawyer Richard Fish on TV's Ally McBeal) makes an appearance as Reeves' professional sidekick. Mostly he's mediocre, yet still better than he is in the Chris Rock vehicle Down To Earth, which also opens today.
The kid -- a friend and neighbour to Theron -- is played well enough by Liam Aiken (who was opposite Kim Basinger in I Dreamed Of Africa and with Julia Roberts in Stepmom). Snappy Gilmore Girls star Lauren Graham is embarrassed here in a thankless role (in her underwear) as Reeves' first girlfriend.
Sweet November was directed by Pat O'Connor, the charming Toronto-trained Irishman whose early career was distinguished by work such as his searing debut Cal. More recently, he has careened from the good (Circle Of Friends, Dancing At Lughnasa) to the bad and the ugly (The January Man). Put the new movie in the reject file. O'Connor should avoid the names of months in his movie titles.
O'Connor makes it obvious he was desperate here when, at a key emotional point, there is an extended montage sequence featuring the brooding Reeves. The montage is so blatantly ridiculous that there is a scene of the woebegone actor strolling along a beach 'thinking' as waves crash the shore.
With nonsense like that in a movie, you know you're doomed.
(This film is rated PG)
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