Someone Like You

When the annals of male bashing movies are being compiled years from now, they should remember to include “Someone Like You,” an annoyingly thin and unoriginal picture. Adapted from Laura Zigman’s novel “Animal Husbandry,” the movie resolutely avoids anything that might smack of a fresh look at the eternal battle between the sexes. I have not read Zigman’s novel, and I am not about to now. “Someone Like You” stars Ashley Judd as the cute girl-next-door Jane Goodale (and the movie labors under the misconception that jokes about people comparing her to the anthropologist Jane Goodall are the zenith of humor). Jane works for a TV talk show host (a mildly diverting but slightly over the top Ellen Barkin), and, it seems, really, really wants a man. When Ray Brown (Kinnear) begins work at the studio, Jane thinks her prayers have been answered. Would you be shocked to learn that she suffers some disappointment? After her relationship with Ray goes south, Jane is forced to move in with office Lothario Eddie (hunk-of-the-month Jackman, last seen in “X-Men”), the one man she could never in a million years fall for, which means, naturally, that he is exactly the one she does fall for.

On the other hand, the movie never manages to demonstrate that Eddie has any interest in her whatsoever. All of this, by the way, drives Jane to concoct a theory of relationships (which she dubs the “new cow theory”) having to do with men’s mating behavior. While I will give this conceit a little credit for the tentatively amusing opening sequence, the further it is pushed the more forced it seems. By the time Jane has accidentally (and pseudonymously) become a famous relationship expert, all sense seems to have left the screen. Ashley Judd pouts and weeps (when she’s not acting like a giddy schoolgirl) and generally behaves like a simp throughout much of the movie, which is a shame. If this is the new face of feminism in 2001, I am especially glad not to be a woman. Jackman mostly stands around with a cigarette and a three-day stubble, although they do manage to find an excuse for him to take his shirt off (maybe this is a liberation fantasy after all, since Judd only has to prance around in her underwear). Kinnear, doing his overly familiar soulful and wounded act, seems to be wondering just why he is there at all.

Screenwriter Chandler and director Goldwyn (himself an actor, making his failure to energize the cast all the more puzzling) seem to think that doling out stereotypes such as men who can’t commit, and men who are heartless womanizers, is a revolution in socially astute comedy. Unfortunately, these clichés are by now old hat, and it would take a lot more imagination than is displayed in “Someone Like You” to make them fresh or interesting. Still, that’s not the worst of their miscalculations. Jackman and Judd simply have no chemistry together. Their scenes of bonding are utterly unconvincing, striving as they do for a lowest common denominator level of niceness. Since we never believe that they belong together, it is pretty hard to care if they ever get together, and that, my friends, is a fatal flaw in a movie purporting to be a romantic comedy. “Someone Like You” is a movie that thinks a soundtrack full of romantic songs will make the movie itself romantic. Sorry, no. At the end of the picture we hear the Van Morrison classic from which the movie takes its name, but all that does is make us wish that the filmmakers had managed to extract one tenth of the heart and soul of that song for their movie. Rather, in the dismal tradition of Hollywood fluff gone awry, they don’t even come close. (4/14/2001)