Review
LAWS OF ATTRACTION
Starring Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore
Directed by Peter Howitt
Opens Friday, April 30
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Eloquent, clever and charming – Laws of Attraction isn’t any of these things. Although it tries to be. Director Peter Howitt’s movie about the romantic skirmishes between two attorneys is an affair as unconvincing as it is lacklustre.
Blame Ally McBeal – the TV series that made the novel choice of humanizing lawyers by giving them the insecurities of high school students. The story here – of a New York divorce attorney fighting tooth-and-nail with her arch rival in the courtroom while trying not to fall in love with him outside of it – is the kind of hackneyed pabulum that would make Ally proud.
About the only thing less funny than a dumb script throwing everything at us for a laugh is a witty script with no bite. Laws of Attraction is loaded with nimble dialogue, but absent of any true grit. Worse still are its clichéd characters. Julianne Moore plays Audrey Miller, an insecure, neurotic lawyer who not only binges on junk food at the slightest provocation, but apparently has never lost a case. Moore screeches her way through most of the film, channelling the same role she’s played many times before – the forlorn, apprehensive wet blanket.
There is no doubt this movie is a study of opposites. Audrey’s rival is almost everything she is not. As Daniel Rafferty, Pierce Brosnan manages to shed his James Bond metrosexuality for a more dishevelled, laid-back persona whose heart is obviously in the right place. The letdown here is the lack of chemistry between the two actors. And how could there be any? Just as we’re given no convincing reason why Audrey shouldn’t fall for Daniel, we have no reason why he should fall for her. When they first kiss, it’s as erotically-charged as watching someone eat liver.
Leave it to the movies to try to make this premise plausible. Drawing from the same well of medical rarities that lets characters get amnesia from a simple blow to the head, Laws of Attraction has Audrey and Daniel wake up after a drunken night only to discover they’ve somehow married each other. To keep themselves out of the tabloids, they decide to stay hitched until their court case is over. You can guess what happens next.
"Lawyers are the scum of the earth," Daniel says early in the movie. "And divorce lawyers are the fungus that grows beneath that scum." Fraught with dark possibilities, it’s the funniest line in the whole film. How unfortunate, then, that Laws of Attraction didn’t take a more wicked, Oscar Wilde-tinged route with its hijinks. As it stands, it’s as banal and innocuous as a Saturday morning cartoon. |
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