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Le Divorce
(Reviewed August 4, 2003)
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WARNING! WARNING! KATE HUDSON ALERT!
Regular backrowreviews.com readers are aware of my complete lack of affection for the Spawn of Hawn, and this preposterously pretentious mess did nothing to change my low opinion of her
abilities. Hudson is so blank, so inept, so completely uninteresting to watch that it is hard to believe any actress could do a worse job of playing her character.
The frightfully unamusing script for this would-be comedy of manners is not elevated in the least by the fact that Hudson's performance has no intrinsic humanity whatsoever. This is one of those
movies where audience members turn to each other at the end and say, "Oh, I guess we were supposed to think that her character actually was sincere about (fill in the blank)," because it frequently is
impossible to tell what might be going on inside her character's head or why she is doing the things she does. This is not because she possesses any mystery or hidden depths, but because she is such a formless, vapid non-entity.
Not that anything could redeem this laughably stupid screenplay in the first place. Here we have Naomi Watts as Hudson's pregnant sister living in Paris with a young daughter who is nothing
more than a prop. Hudson and Watts are California girls, daughters of a Santa Barbara university professor and wife who quite obviously have Lots o' Bucks and some book-learnin', but who act like
completely unsophisticated ugly-American hayseeds when they drop by the City of Lights for a visit in the second half of the film. Watts' French husband has decided to leave Watts while she is still With
Child, which leads his decadently wealthy family and hers to spar over who owns an expensive painting that Watts brought to the marriage from her parents' house. Are you feeling sleepy yet? Everything about this insufferable catalog of rich people's petty problems makes you want to rob the wealthy, push their smugly well-scrubbed faces into the dirt, and burn their damned mansions. Or maybe that's just me.
Hudson, meanwhile, seduces one of the randy older members of the French family, then proceeds to act like a schoolgirl twit when it comes to handling the affair. About three-quarters through
the movie, I started wondering why a plot this brainlessly soap-operatic had not yet featured the appearance of a handgun. And then, voila!
Incredibly, this botched souffle is from the Merchant-Ivory folks, who apparently should stick to adapting the classics instead of trying to branch out into contemporary trash.
"Le Divorce" est merde.
Back Row Grade: F
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