| THE PERFECT MAN |
 2005 - USADirector: Catherine Hardwicke
- Reviewed by Vickie
The wince-inducing attempt at Cyrano is only one of several flaws plaguing this misfire of a romantic comedy. It is, after all, a Hilary Duff movie, so it can be forgiven (to some extent) for its tone and plotting since the target audience seems to be girls under 12. But, as a movie for grown-ups, it flops. In a misguided effort to convey some kind of feminist awakening for the female characters (“We don’t need a man to complete us! We just need each other!”), the story centers on Jean and her daughters, Holly and Zoe (Aria Wallace). [A small aside to screenwriters everywhere: what say we put an embargo on “Zoe” as a stock name for all precocious young girls. Ditto “Sam” for intelligent, independent teenaged girls. They’ve both been done to death. Thanks.] Jean is a cake decorator desperate to live happily ever after with her dream guy…who, it turns out, is any man who doesn’t dump her. Sadly, she’s bounced out of one relationship after another, and her “solution” is to pack up the girls and move to a new city to start over after each failed relationship. At the outset of The Perfect Man, the trio land in Brooklyn, and a fed-up Holly decides that this will be their final move. Holly wants her mom to be happy, and feels Jean deserves “the perfect man,” so she creates one using the advice doled out by Ben Cooper (Chris Noth), the strapping and shockingly insightful uncle of Holly’s newbestfriend (Vanessa Lengies). Holly poses as Ben, sets up a fake email address, sends her mom gifts and love notes and carries on quite the romance, all while her poor, lonely mother believes Mr. Right has finally arrived. Parallel to this are the continued efforts of loutish Lenny (Mike O’Malley), Jean’s smitten, Styx-loving bakery co-worker, who wants nothing more than to sweep jean off her feet to the tune of Mr. Roboto. He’s macho in a movie sense (he drives a Trans Am!) and reminded me of While You Were Sleeping’s Joe Jr., but his character would have worked so much better if he’d been a truly kind-hearted, lovable schlub (see: Kevin James in Hitch) who’d force Jean to choose between an imaginary ideal and an real, live average Joe with a heart of gold. Alas, the filmmakers never move beyond the cliché. Speaking of which, The Perfect Man is laden with clichés. From the “we are family!” scene where the Hamilton women lip-sync and dance crazily in the living room to signify their whimsical solidarity, to the mistaken-identity wedding scene where the folks being joined in holy matrimony aren’t who they seem, the script feels recycled from a dozen rom-coms before it. It’s like the product of leftover pages from movies like You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle. But, again, I just kept telling myself, “This is a Hilary Duff movie. This is a Hilary Duff movie.” Honestly, what was I expecting? It’s not like she’s carved out a career in serious, though-provoking dramas, and this movie pretty much delivered on the unspoken promise of fluffy, empty, logic-challenged storytelling. So I can’t really say I was surprised or disappointed. But if young Miss Duff isn’t careful, films like this and previous dud Raise Your Voice will result in an unfortunate new definition for her oeuvre: crappy. |
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The skeeviest moment in The Perfect Man comes about 2/3 of the
way through, when single mom Jean Hamilton (Heather Locklear) is
unknowingly having a cyber-love-chat with her teenage daughter, Holly
(Hilary Duff). They sit there, face-to-face (thanks to a split-screen
technique) pouring out their hearts to each other. I know it was meant
to be an innocuous scene, and it might have worked better if the
filmmakers had established that mom and daughter never communicate so
this faux conversation allows each insight into the other, but I just
felt queasy. My friend Tim summed it up better: “Ewwww! It’s like
they’re in love!”