Film

Let’s not hold Renée Zellweger’s chipmunk charms against her. Indeed, you’ll find no ill will directed toward the Oscar winner here. Zellweger subscribes to a definition of leading-ladydom that dates back to screwball queen Carole Lombard; you can’t exactly imagine Angelina Jolie doing face-plants in the Minnesota snow, but Zellweger pitches herself gamely. She wriggles around in too-tight outfits and somehow makes her legs stretch a million miles.

 But New in Town raises some serious alarms. Shouldn’t an agent be fired? Somebody? A shockingly banal script (credited to Ken Rance and C. Jay Cox, although last-minute edits were made) lends the movie a generic awfulness; you wish Zellweger were in better hands. Foolish mistakes overwhelm in the first 20 minutes alone: Would high-powered Miami executive Lucy Hill (Zellweger) seriously arrive in the wintry North wearing heels and no sweater? She’s come to the small town of New Ulm—already introduced in a cringeworthy scene of Fargo-like accent abuse—to make deep personnel cuts at a corporate-owned factory. But the beer-swilling local union rep, Ted (Connick), might have something to say about that. Also, he’s a widower.  

These are the conventions of romantic comedy. But do they have to be doled out so strenuously, and with zero irony? Lucy comes to smile at the town’s religiosity; she performs a heroic makeover on Ted’s teenage daughter and proves herself scrappy when her board insists on rough tactics. But as a fantasy of economic salvation, New in Town feels especially phony. Jokes about layoffs aren’t going to wring laughs.