The film is one of those sassy period comedies where all the characters speak in vaudeville-style Southern accents, trade snappy banter over cocktails, and pine for the 'American Dream.' Everything about their behavior is stale, and everything they desire rings of outdated shallowness. Renée Zellweger headlines the film as Anne Devereaux, a New York socialite with a band leader husband (Kevin Bacon) who cheats on her every night, and two adolescent sons who have grown up ignored by their parents' selfishness. As the film begins, Anne makes the decision to leave her philandering hubby and abandon all the cushy luxuries of the life she knows. She storms through her posh penthouse, pulls her boys out of school, and uses some of her savings to buy the new Cadillac that will take her on the 'ride of her life!'
That ride consists of a cross-country journey in which Anne lugs her two sons, one a cynical writer named George (Logan Lerman), the other an overt gay stereotype named Robbie (Mark Rendall), from notable city to notable city (Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.) in an attempt to find her new 'man of the house,' i.e. meal ticket. The candidates consist of a handful of notable TV actors, including Chris Noth, Eric McCormack, and Steven Weber, whom the film treats as day players. They appear on screen to flash their famous faces and then disappear because the film has no legitimate use for their talents.
My One and Only is not a particularly revealing look at life for women in the time period; it's more of the sitcom version, with some bluesy melodrama thrown in to make the proceedings all the more nauseating. In fact, rather than daring to deal truthfully with the impossible plight of '50s-era independent women, the film seems to celebrate the surface charms of Zellweger's shallow dame and ignore the implications of womanhood during a repressive time period. When the film finally achieves a rare moment of clarity about the advantages of life for beautiful women versus plain women, it comes out of the mouth of its most loathed character, Anne's homely sister, who is portrayed as a harping, jealous shrew. She speaks truths about the hierarchy among women in a patriarchal society, but the film treats her outcry as jealous babbling.
For the uninitiated, George Hamilton's childhood is the impetus for My One and Only, a fact the film treats as a winking surprise after the audience has already lost interest. It is not based on any archived source material, however; instead, the story goes by Hamilton's recollections of his youth. The fragmented nature of memory might explain why this screenplay is such an uneven pastiche of hazy episodes that drift from one to the next without any natural flow. Characters enter the picture with haste and exit without notice, while the story desperately attempts to weave subtexts of true love and bad parenting through a surface plot that has no time for thoughtful pause. The actors are not helped by this screenplay, either; Zellweger, an actress capable of exuding great charm, essentially uses a combination of the reliable quirks that she keeps in her back pocket when her heart isn't in it. The other actors are given such short shrift that they have no space to develop any real characterization beyond redundant caricatures.
Most '50s-era sitcom characters were, indeed, caricatures, and exposing that myth of purity might have been an intriguing route for this film to take. But writer Charlie Peters and director Richard Loncraine rest on the entertainment value of simply observing those impish socialites and their zesty charms. I'm not asking for a film in which the '50s socialite posts a video profile on YouTube, but it might be nice to have an attitude toward this material based on our modern perspective. Instead, this movie feels like a black-and-white rerun on late-night TV.
The DVD includes two making-of featurettes.
Divorce me, Renee.
