New in Town
Running time 96 minutes
Written by Kenneth Rance and C.Jay Cox
Directed by Jonas Elmer
Starring Renée Zellweger, Harry Connick Jr., J. K. Simmons, Siobhan Fallon Hogan
Limping into the New Year, the romantic comedy New in Town stars Renée Zellweger as curvaceous Lucy Hill, a boiled, opportunistic career girl who, while climbing the corporate ladder in a Miami food conglomerate, gets reluctantly recruited to act as the new plant manager of an archaic assembly-line dairy processing factory in New Ulm, Minn., that cranks out a product called Power Packed Protein Pudding. The culture shock is instant; the romantic interludes routine; the outcome that changes the heroine’s life and teaches her the restorative powers of homespun cracker-barrel values is predictable; and the comedy is harmless as a farm-fresh egg, sunny side up and runny in the middle. Pleasant enough going down, but an hour after breakfast you can’t remember what it tasted like.
No wonder no city slicker has previously survived the job in New Ulm. No need for stiletto-heel Jimmy Choos, designer labels and red convertibles in this horrible, donkey-eared, Norwegian backwoods community where the term “below zero” means a day at the beach. It’s a town of gingerbread schlosses, Alpine cafes and beer-guzzling folks who serve noodles and tapioca with gravy and talk like Frances McDormand in Fargo. Every pickup truck comes equipped with a snowplow and every kitchen comes equipped with a meatloaf. Lucy can’t wait to wrap up this job and get the hell back to sipping piña coladas in a bikini. Her instructions: Downsize and reduce the workload; reconfigure production; and modernize the plant with robots. First mistake: She fires the plant foreman for giving everyone a holiday on the first day of ice fishing, a no-no that attracts the ire of a sexy, bearded blue-collar union rep (Harry Connick, Jr.) with a 13-year-old daughter. With Mr. Connick as the employee rep, the hate at first sight between management and personnel invites an unmistakable comparison with his recent Broadway musical, The Pajama Game, with the gender roles reversed. Nothing melts the ice faster than a single-daddy hunk with a four-wheel drive, but just when Lucy starts to thaw, corporate headquarters orders her to shut down the factory completely. Trying to save her new friends from ruin, Lucy comes up with a plan to produce and test-market her secretary’s secret recipe for tapioca. Utilizing the present workforce and the plant’s discarded, antediluvian yogurt machines proves so cost-effective that the company goes into mass production, she’s promoted to vice president and the future of New Ulm is secure. Now if only Lucy could figure out a way to pull her love life together, this thing could end before Harry Connick Jr., a better actor than singer, gets a chance to make his way to the barroom piano. Miraculously, opposites attract once again, in a fairy-tale finish so preposterous it would bore the citizens of New Ulm.
Acted with over-easy charm, especially by Ms. Zellweger and a supporting cast of self-assured loonies, including J. K. Simmons, Frances Conroy and Siobhan Fallon Hogan, New in Town was directed perfunctorily but without much energy by Jonas Elmer, a Danish import whose biggest claim to English-speaking fame was working as an assistant to Stephen Frears on a Diet Coke commercial. Due to the cost-cutting economy affecting movie budgets everywhere, Minnesota is played by Winnipeg. Tapioca, anyone?
rreed@observer.com
