MUST LOVE CUSACK Forgiving audiences still can enjoy ‘Must Love Dogs’
Lately, Hollywood has gotten so obsessed with doing big things badly, it may have forgotten how to do small things well.
An overdone version of a mediocre TV show, a crashing confab of comic-book heroes – these genres it’s mastered. But a gentle little romantic comedy? A small, sweet story of two adults meeting, and parting, and meeting again, and maybe finding love in spite of themselves? That’s growing rare, which is why even a mild movie like “Must Love Dogs” can be a bit of a treat.
The story stars the intelligently winning Diane Lane as Sarah, a recent divorcee with a big support system that is determined she start dating again. And so they sign her up for an online dating service, upload an only mildly deceptive description and wait for the e-mails to come.
Not surprisingly, they do. Also, not surprisingly, many of them come from less-than-desirable sources. (“I thought you’d be younger,” one unhappy date remarks when they finally meet.)
This is all fairly rote romantic comedy, and nothing that director Gary David Goldberg does makes it seem any newer (or disguises his past, which includes more than 20 years of making such TV sitcoms as “Family Ties”). The quick-skit series of bad first dates is a sequence we’ve seen before, as are the characters who begin and end the movie by talking to the camera.
Still, if Goldberg is slick, at least he’s smart and sometimes the lines connect in surprising ways, as when a well-meaning relative wonders if anyone can think of “a friend for Sarah.”
” ‘A Friend for Sarah,’ ” Lane muses. “I’m now an episode of ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ “
Years of episodic TV also have taught Goldberg the value of casting sympathetic actors as your leads and scene-stealers in your supporting roles.
In an industry that rarely gives women older than 40 much of a chance, Lane – with “A Walk on the Moon,” “Unfaithful” and “Under the Tuscan Sun” – has built a fine new career playing grown-ups suddenly caught up in a midlife passion. She consistently elevates the material, and she does that here, often in subtle ways (one nice visual touch is the new hairdos Sarah adopts for each date, and how they reflect her current mood).
Of the various potential boyfriends she meets, Dermot Mulroney gamely takes on the most thankless role of all – second male lead in a woman’s picture – and does it with easy grace. John Cusack is even better as a broken-hearted eccentric, endlessly rewatching “Dr. Zhivago” and mourning his past lost love. Impulsive, romantic and maybe just a bit unstable, he’s like Lloyd Dobler of “Say Anything,” 20 years later.
The supporting parts, meanwhile, are as memorable and perfectly cast as the patients on an old “Bob Newhart Show” episode (a series that Goldberg also worked on). Grand old Christopher Plummer gets to recite some Yeats as Lane’s father. Elizabeth Perkins – like Lane, another one of Hollywood’s overlooked smart brunettes – gets the best lines as Lane’s meddling older sister, while Stockard Channing, finally daring to look her age, has a few moments of real pathos as an aging but still hopeful single.
All of which, unfortunately, still fails to add up to a great movie. There are characters who go nowhere, and too many plot developments feel contrived. Plus, the ending is the same old sudden realization/race to reunite/public humiliation that’s ended almost every romantic comedy for the past decade.
But during this long, hot summer of spandex and disaster, moviegoers of a certain age must take their pleasures where they can find them. And if that means smiling politely through a few occasional bad jokes, overlooking a slightly dull or repetitive minute or two and trying to concentrate on an experience’s good points – well, isn’t that what the movie itself is all about?