The production notes for Jersey Girl, Kevin Smith's widowed-father-raises-spunky-moppet film, come with a warm and fuzzy director's statement in which Kevin Smith, the creator of Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma, baldly states that this paean to fatherhood and family ties is his most personal film.
"It's not only spun from a six-year love affair with my wife and child, but also the 33-year-long love affair I was lucky to share with my own recently deceased Dad," he declares.
Had one iota of the feeling expressed in Smith's statement made its way to the screen in his new movie, Jersey Girl, it might have signaled his transition from a smart-aleck chronicler of trash-talking suburban slackers and idle mall rats to something more substantial. But sadly, Smith has made a movie so false and blatantly icky that it's the film equivalent of making goo-goo noises and chucking a baby under the chin for 103 minutes. At the end, all you're left with is drool and a mountain of baby powder.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
The cautionary lesson of Jersey Girl, which might be that when it comes to screenwriting, facetiousness is a lot easier to convey than deep personal feeling. The movie, crammed with wince-inducing contrivances, false notes and fizzled jokes, all leading to a tired race-against-time ending, is so bad that it could stand as a textbook example of what not to do if you're an independent filmmaker flirting with the Hollywood mainstream.
At the center of the movie stands Ben Affleck, whose talent has curdled as his tabloid notoriety has spread. Portraying Ollie Trinke, a high-powered Manhattan-based music publicist who meets and loses his true love, Affleck is tolerable as a selfish, arrogant handmaiden to the stars. It's when he's required to change into a simpler, nicer guy that Affleck gets into trouble, straining in vain to twist what has become a natural sneer into a semblance of a smile.
Poor Affleck is also required to deliver what may be the longest, most overwrought harangue visited on a helpless infant since Ginger Rogers bombarded her baby boy with World War II propaganda in Tender Comrade.
Ollie marries the strong-willed Gertrude Steiney (Jennifer Lopez), but she dies in childbirth less than 15 minutes into the movie. The death leaves Ollie (and Affleck) rudderless. Shouldered with the responsibility of bringing up his infant daughter, Gertie (Raquel Castro), he leaves her day-to-day care to his hard-working blue-collar dad, Bart (George Carlin), in Highlands, New Jersey.
Eventually Bart rebels. And in what should have be an appallingly funny moment worthy of an Albert Brooks crash-and-burn scene, Ollie carts the baby to a news conference during which the combined stresses of a diaper crisis and work precipitate a public meltdown in which he bad-mouths the about-to-be superstar Will Smith.
The gaffe leaves him not just unemployed but also blackballed from the publicity business.
Leaping seven years ahead, Ollie is living with his father and daughter in Highlands and working at a dead-end job while dreaming of a comeback. But when an opportunity finally presents itself, he must choose between going to a job interview or attending a grade school pageant, in which Gertie and friends are doing a throat-slitting scene from Sweeney Todd. (Don't ask why.)
The movie also throws in a half-baked love story in which Ollie's friendship with Maya (Liv Tyler), a pliable video-store clerk who proffers her sexual services, flowers into love. Tyler, whose monotone matches a face that's the equivalent of pasteurized milk, has never been blander. Instead of a presence, she's an absence.
Completing the picture is Castro as the too-adorable daughter. In tune with the rest of the movie, Gertie is the kind of Everygirl who veers between saccharine and cute without bothering to stop at believable.
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