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About a Boy (Chris and Paul Weitz) 2002
* * 1/2 5-26-02 Jeremy Heilman |
The early scenes in Chris and
Paul Weitz’s About a Boy seem to be daring the audience to laugh.
We’re introduced to Will (Hugh Grant), a lazy bachelor that’s so loathsome
and sarcastic that we can’t quite trust anything that he says or does. Grant
is something like a used car salesman here. He’s trying to sell himself to us
with a toothy grin that he pulls out whenever he’s lying to us. He’s not
conventionally charming here, but instead uses his charm as a way of making us
overlook his serious character flaws. Even though we suspect the worst, we want
to believe him, since he’s the “hero” in this story, and most of the
movie’s charms seem tentative as a result of this uneasy relationship with
him. “Yes, I really am that shallow,” he tells a friend early on, and the
too-convincing buildup of Will’s bad qualities make it that much tougher to
swallow the uplift that follows.
The movie, set in London, relies
on a series of implausible events that place Will squarely in the affections of
Marcus, a pasty young kid that looks like he might have been a Harry Potter
reject. The two inevitably enrich each other with their presence, and the road
to emotional enlightenment is set upon. It's familiar material done with a level
of intelligence that’s slightly above average, but as the movie proceeds
toward its touchy-feely conclusion, you can’t help but shake the feeling that
you were having more fun with the old, sarcastic, lying Will. There’s a reason
that Will, who enjoys the flashy tchotchkes of his bachelorhood, chose to live
the way that he did, and that’s because it is much more exciting than
settling down.
The film’s trajectory is
predictable, but you keep wishing that the film would return to the toothiness
of the opening scenes, and since it never does it’s a disappointment. The
supporting cast is acceptable, but no one is allowed to show anything near the
charisma that Grant did. Most of the British cast is exploited for their
freakishness early on, so the film’s attempts to make us love their
eccentricities later on are strained. Luckily there are a few intermittent
laughs, but they don’t come from the jokes that the movie spends its time
building up to (the climactic talent show, for example, is not at all funny).
The small quips and reactions, where Will momentarily reverts to his old self,
are the only things that keep us interested in About a Boy.