Sweet Home Alabama

First off, I need to establish my bonafides concerning my southern status: I was born in Kannapolis, North Carolina, spent most of my life in a couple of small Florida towns, and came to Asheville about two years ago. With that in mind, I’m more than a little intrigued to see the South as it is depicted by Hollywood in Sweet Home Alabama. It doesn’t matter that it’s set in Alabama — done to capitalize on the song. Trust me, if the damned song was called “Sweet Home North Carolina,” it would have been set here. They shot the movie in in Georgia.

I reckon Georgia looked more like their notion of the Jeff “You might be a redneck if” Foxworthy Southland. It’s all just so much backwards backwoods filled with unkempt yokels whose idea of cleaning up after a hard day’s work is a quick change of shirt. Then its time to steer their beat-up pick-up trucks (coon hound optional) into town, to show a lady a good time at the local bar/pool hall where customers are advised not to dance on the tables while wearing spurs.

Spurs? Either the filmmakers have confused the south with a cliche-riven wild west, or there’s something mighty kinky going on in Pigeon Creek, Alabama. What can you say about a movie that sets a scene in the local “Coon Hound Cemetery?” This is a fixture of southern living that I have inexplicably missed. At least they could have done a retake on the last shot where Reese Witherspoon bumps into a “concrete” coon hound effigy atop a tombstone and it wobbles like the plastic prop it is. Was director Andy Tennant possessed by the spirit of Ed Wood?

If the old family home must be a trailer, couldn’t they at least settle on what kind of trailer? Unless this structure is a deep-fried variant on Dr. Who’s TARDIS, I’m at a loss to explain why it’s a single-wide in the exterior shots and a double-wide in the interior ones! The action takes place in a town with one (closeted) gay man and no blacks, where everyone talks like they’re auditioning for a low budget Gone with the Wind and ATMs are unknown.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m weary of being reduced to a stereotype. Being from the south doesn’t mean I own the collected recordings of Lynyrd Skynyrd, re-enact Civil War battles, and have Confederate flag throw-pillows on my sofa. Realism, of course, is hardly at the center of Sweet Home Alabama, which represents screenwriting 101 at its most predictable. It’s another of those tiresome bromides written by moneyed urbanites about the virtues of having nothing and living simply. When those responsible for this movie chuck their Hollywood lives to work in a generic factory in some small town, I’ll reconsider my take on the sincerity of their message.

Till then, I remain skeptical of a story that has a New York fashion designer (Witherspoon) nearing world-wide success, about to marry the Kennedyesque son (Patrick Dempsey) of the mayor of New York (Candice Bergen) becoming re-involved with her good ol’ boy husband (Josh Lucas) to get his signature on divorce papers. The press-kit promises surprises galore in this plot, despite the fact that the trailer says it all and the film’s catch-phrase is “Sometimes what you’re looking for is right where you left it.”

If Witherspoon had ended up in a menage with both men, or the two guys had hooked up and left Witherspoon in a relationship with Candice Bergen, I would have been surprised. I wasn’t.

I’ll give the movie this much — it’s nice to look at. Tennant has style, knowing just where to place his camera to get the most out of a joke. Unfortunately, the jokes are thin and unfunny. The cast is generally appealing — even if Witherspoon gets a little too high-pitched for my taste and Bergen is treading water in her Murphy Brown shtick. But there’s only so much — and not nearly enough — that can be done with the material. Perhaps they wanted to make a modern epic, a Gone with the Wind. While they achieved nothing of the sort, they did manage to make it seem as long.