Thursday, December 22, 2005
Adding to the difficulty is her character's fling with Kevin Costner's.
By CHRIS HEWITT
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Every time I started to enjoy "Rumor Has It," I also wondered if a Jennifer Aniston-ectomy might make me like it more.
Usually, I don't want to surgically remove Aniston, who did inventive work in "The Good Girl" and on "Friends." But her tepid bathwater of a performance in "Rumor Has It" stays on the same glum note for the whole movie, which springs to life whenever she shuts up and another character takes over.
Mark Ruffalo, for instance, has a well-written scene in which he tells Aniston, his fianc & eacute;e, off. Shirley MacLaine, as Aniston's grandmother, and Richard Jenkins, as Aniston's smarter-than-she-thinks dad, also do vivid, surprising acting.
Back again
And then the camera shifts back to Aniston. She plays Sarah, who becomes convinced she doesn't seem to fit into her family because her dad isn't her biological dad. She believes "The Graduate" was based on her family, which means both her late mother and her grandmother slept with the same man (the character Dustin Hoffman played in the movie -- the "real-life" version here is played by Kevin Costner), who could be her father.
Adding a degree of difficulty for Aniston is that her character has a gross fling with Costner. Let's face it -- mating with three generations of the same family might work for racehorses and Gregor Mendel's pea pods, but it's icky when actual people do it.
That subplot hogs the middle of the movie, but director Rob Reiner wisely inserts lively stuff to distract us (Kathy Bates does one of her bawdy cameos, Mena Suvari has some bright moments, MacLaine invokes both "Terms of Endearment" and "Casablanca") and to let us know "Rumor Has It" will be heading back to surer territory.
The result is a wayward movie, sort of like a trip to Florida from New York via Cairo, Ill. -- there's not much to do in Cairo, but there are several worthy stops (Indianapolis, Memphis) along the way.