The New Yorker
Issue of 2005-05-16; Posted 2005-05-09
The Current Cinema Royalty
"Kings and Queen" and "Monster-in-Law."
By David Denby
SPOILERS!
[...]
In “Monster-in-Law,” a comedy set in L.A., there are banks of flowers everywhere—moist, rolling tapestries of petals laid out in private homes, on the sets of TV talk shows, in restaurants. In case we miss the blooming-and-blossoming theme, the heroine, Charlie (Jennifer Lopez), a Venice Beach free spirit who works as a dog-walker, caterer, and temp, also paints floral whatnots on the walls of her apartment. The sun shines unrelentingly, and the people are awfully sweet—everyone, that is, except for Jane Fonda, who, in a misguided “comeback,” gives an embarrassing performance as a virago. “Monster-in-Law” is a lame, unofficial spinoff of “Meet the Parents.” In this version, Lopez turns up as the Ben Stiller outsider. Her Charlie falls in love with a dreamboat (Michael Vartan), and Fonda, in the equivalent of the De Niro role, is a neurotic dragon who wants to keep the dreamboat—her son—all to herself. A Barbara Walters-type great lady of TV news, Fonda’s character, Viola, has recently been dumped from her job, and she has turned sodden and self-pitying. She objects to Charlie for all sorts of reasons, though she never mentions what her snobbish character is most likely to find amiss—the fact that Charlie is a Latina. You can see the strategic thinking here: Lopez is a big crossover star; why dramatize the issue of ethnicity? Someone, somewhere, in some corner of the world, might get upset. This way, the combat between the two women, however malevolent and ridiculous, somehow remains clean. Viola tries to drive Charlie away by playing nasty tricks on her, and Charlie fights back, until the two women, all dressed up on the wedding day, take turns whamming each other across the face. None of this Three Stoogian warfare, however, ruffles the vapidity of “Monster-in-Law.” Charlie has nothing in her head—not an idea, a passion, a taste for anything. She’s just a nice girl who wants to cuddle with her beau and disappear into the roses-and-petunias gentility of California kitsch.
O.K., it’s silly to get upset. “Monster-in-Law” is a commercial product, as squarely aimed at teen-age girls as an advertisement for pink cell phones. Still, the self-confident fatuity and condescension of the movie is offensive. Jennifer Lopez has beautiful skin and a marvellous figure, but if she’s trying to achieve something in her movie work, I can’t tell what it is. Except for a few minutes in “Out of Sight,” she’s been wasting her time. In this movie, her eyes are empty, and her delivery lags an instant behind the beat. In making her character so dim and bland, the filmmakers—the writer, Anya Kochoff, and the director, Robert Luketic—are as insulting as Viola in their limited notion of what’s acceptable. And they’ve matched Lopez with another cipher: Michael Vartan, who is supposed to be a talented surgeon. Vartan has a cleft chin and a warming smile; he’s certainly very handsome, but what kind of romantic hero fails to stick up for his fiancée when his rampaging mom tries to annihilate her? The cad! This smart young surgeon never notices what’s going on. I know “Monster-in-Law” is just a slapstick comedy, but is it too much to expect the characters to exhibit routine intelligence? The only person in the movie who’s not a dummy is Wanda Sykes, as Viola’s wisecracking assistant. In movies and television, there’s a long, honorable tradition, still alive, of the straight-talking sidekick, but, in the clichéd context of “Monster-in-Law,” having a black servant around to talk back to her mistress is a mortifying reversion to comic devices from sixty years ago, when Eddie Anderson’s Rochester sassed Jack Benny.
At an enormous house party, Fonda, wearing a turban, throws up her arms in greeting, like Lucille Ball going all giddy in “Mame.” Putting her famous body into it, she pops her eyes and snaps her head back and laughs hysterically. Perhaps only a very earnest liberal could play a name-dropping, millionaire harpy with such dedication, but Fonda is so strenuous that she’s almost unwatchable. I hope this isn’t her last movie performance; it would serve as a gruesome end to what has been a striking, if somewhat aborted, career. As a young woman, Fonda was a Hollywood princess who disdained the prerogatives of royalty. She wanted to make her own way, and she apprenticed herself to Lee Strasberg’s Method, in New York. You could always see the determination that went into her acting—she was never a natural, with a flowing, lyrical gift. The temperamental traits she drew on, apart from will, seemed to be anxiety and anger, and, at her best, working on nerve and instinct, she took chances that most actresses would have shied away from. She was bitterly intelligent—hard-tempered and fast—in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) and “Klute” (1971) and, much later, as the alcoholic, washed-up actress in Sidney Lumet’s “The Morning After” (1986). Then, interested in too many other things, she pretty much dropped out of acting. It’s too bad that, realizing her own singular nature, she didn’t find a few screenwriters to create substantial roles for her in smaller projects, and a couple of good directors willing to work on them. At the age of sixty-seven, she could still pull this off, if she wanted to. It wouldn’t be easy, of course, but there was never anything serious that she couldn’t do once she put her mind to it.
© CondéNet 2005
 Back To Monster-in-Law Expositions
|
