I Could Never Be Your Woman

I Could Never Be Your Woman is an Amy Heckerling film in the very best sense: very funny, culturally relevant, a little bitter and a little sweet. Heckerling’s body of work is often labeled inconsistent: On the plus side, you have teen classics Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless, both of which captured the ’80s and ’90s zeitgeists perfectly and were huge commercial and critical successes. On the other, more disappointing side, we find the Look Who’s Talking trilogy and A Night at the Roxbury. After her last foray behind the camera, the mildly funny but pretty uninteresting film The Loser, Heckerling has come back with an extremely entertaining and likeable movie that has unfortunately been overshadowed by a lot of controversy regarding the film’s release and studio politics. I Could Never Be Your Woman is a movie about Rosie, a divorced woman in her 40s (Michelle Pfeiffer) and the younger man she falls in love with (the perennially likeable Paul Rudd). It is also a movie about youth-obsessed Hollywood, celebrity culture, and the inevitability of aging. Rosie is the mother of a teenage daughter (Atonement’s Saoirse Ronan) and struggles to raise her daughter apart from the warped narcissistic values of Hollywood, while being in a position of perpetuating those same values (Pfeiffer plays the creator and producer of a teen TV show). While the movie is otherwise a jumbled mess of themes and plot points, Heckerling succeeds in keeping it cohesive. With this A-list cast, Heckerling’s strong pedigree, and a genuinely enjoyable script, this is a film that didn’t deserve a straight-to-video-release. --Kira Canny

2006

R

5708758669603

Movie

2018-02-07 21:42:44

1.85:1

97

241

2

2018-02-07 21:42:44