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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 26 February 2009

Renée Zellweger plays a tough businesswoman
in New In Town

To Zell and back with small-town romance

NEW IN TOWN
Directed by Jonas Elmer
Certificate 12a

THIS has meanness written all over it. While lead Renée Zellweger battles gamely to inject some kooky humour and gentle fun into the proceedings, the starting premise is so dire that she has no chance.
Zellweger is a high-powered, sun-loving executive based in Miami and is desperate to succeed in a man’s world.
To prove her mettle, she is sent to a town in frozen Minnesota to sack half the workers at a food-processing plant.
There she meets hunky union man Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick Jnr) and you can guess the rest.
The town is billeted and is apparently the “most German” place in America. Each scene therefore is played out with a backdrop of irritating oompah music crossed with bluegrass. And the joke continues with constant barbs at the ridiculousness of the German national character. Everyone’s surname is said with a heavily emphasised raspberry sound.
Connick Jnr’s character is a one-dimensional good-guy hero. He is a widower who has lost his wife in tragic circumstances.
It is so poorly telegraphed to the audience as a way of showing his soft side under a gruff truckie exterior, that the sentence “my dear wife had a degenerative heart disease” was greeted with whoops of laughter in the cinema.
A union man, he bangs the drum for the downtrodden workers while Zellweger’s power-crazy capitalist itches to sack, sack, sack. As you can imagine, the twains must eventually meet.
I suppose I should feel slightly sorry for Zellweger. She does her best with measly pickings, gamely approaching the jokes head on and with charm – but it’s nonsense.
As if it couldn’t get any worse, there are a number of irritating product placements – our heroine is clutching a logo’d coffee as she rushes into a highpowered business meeting, and there are brand names in every shot of a coat she believes will keep her snug in the minus-40s of Minnesota.
Furthermore, the cheap stereotypes throughout could alienate the very box office fodder the studio hopes will place their bums on the seats.
It is nasty about women with careers – you have to be a thoughtless, self-obsessed nut if you are a woman in a good job, the film tells us.
And as for anyone living in small-town America, they are a bunch of boring, uncouth hicks who deserve to be condescended at every opportunity. Just horrible.

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