Romantic comedies can get away with murder. There is something so much more memorable about a terrible film from any other genre, and the reason is simple: Everyone likes a happy ending, inside or outside of the massage parlor. Rob Reiner’s latest outing, Rumor Has It, could be used as the starting point of an 80-page treatise on modern romantic comedy formula, but for all intents and purposes, let’s keep this semi-brief.

Sarah (Jennifer Aniston) is returning home to Pasadena to serve as bridesmaid at her only sister’s wedding. Her father (Richard Jenkins) still does silly fatherly things, and her fiancé Jeff (Mark Ruffalo) is too proper to join the mile high club with her. As fate would have it, Sarah has just accepted a wedding proposal from Jeff, but (shocker) she has cold feet.

Her hesitancy catches the eye of Katherine (Shirley MacLaine), her grandmother, and sparks a talk about her late mother. Within this talk, it is hinted at, and later revealed, that her mother was in love with someone else when she was younger, and this man might be her real father, who also slept with Katherine. This is paired with a completely useless plot device of Sarah’s family being the basis of Charles Webb’s The Graduate. Sarah finally hunts the man down, and he ends up being Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner). She finds out he isn’t her father, and things get worse before they get better.

The most annoying thing about the film is how Reiner convolutes the basic plot with so many unneeded scenes and pointless extra storylines. Sarah’s sister (Mena Suvari) obviously serves as a simple reason to get Sarah back home, but Reiner allows a myriad of scenes with her, worrying about her marriage and all the normal gobbledygook. Ted Griffin, a talented screenwriter, has seemingly lost all the charisma that he gave off in his scripts for Ocean’s Eleven, Matchstick Men, and Ravenous. At moments in the movie (mostly near the end), the camera work and dialogue oozes cheap melodrama and false sentiment to the point of nausea. And the constant “in” jokes about Pasadena don’t help anything.

The actors make it sufferable, but barely. MacLaine shows the same patented sass she exuded in her early years and Costner, perhaps rejuvenated by his Award-worthy turn in The Upside of Anger, has a loose, light charm that makes it impossible not to watch him. That’s the good news. Aniston never shows any of the depth she gave her character in Miguel Arteta’s excellent The Good Girl, and Ruffalo is wasted in a by-the-numbers character. Don’t get me started on watching Jenkins, the wise-ass, dead father from HBO’s Six Feet Under, getting all sappy and soggy; it’s devastating, and not in the good way.

Reiner, a maestro of romantic comedy and Hollywood films, has done a great disservice to himself. The reason that the bulk of Reiner’s films ultimately work is because all the side plots have something to do with the main plot and add another layer to the main characters. Here, the side-plots seem so scattershot and unneeded that we can’t keep attention on the main subject: Sarah’s uneasiness over marriage and her family. Therefore, our empathy and desire to follow Sarah and her story lags and boredom settles in, to a severe degree. But give this much to Reiner: He made me really want to see The Graduate again.



Just saw it.