Entertainment

SAVED BY THE BELLE: A DELIGHTFUL REESE FURNISHES ‘SWEET HOME’ WITH STYLE

SWEET HOME ALABAMA

½

Uneven, predictable screwball comedy.

Running time: 108 minutes. Rated PG-13 (adult themes). At the AMC Empire 25, the Loews 84th Street, Chelsea Cinemas, others.

HER triumphs in “Election,” “Pleasantville” and even 1996’s “Freeway” were all very well, but it takes a movie like “Sweet Home Alabama” (or last year’s “Legally Blonde”) to make you appreciate just how remarkable Reese Witherspoon is.

Normally, the combination of a wearily formulaic plot and an uneven comic tone – which lurches from anemic sentimentality to lame slapstick to (presumably) unintentional nastiness and back to sentimentality – would be fatal for a would-be screwball comedy like this one.

But Witherspoon is such a delight – her comic timing so good, and her pixie-ish good looks so fascinating – that she manages to make “Sweet Home Alabama” seem charming and funny. It’s only when you’re leaving the theater that her spell wears off and you realize just how bad the movie, directed by Andy Tennant, really is.

Witherspoon plays Melanie Carmichael, a rising Manhattan fashion designer who happens to be markedly thinner and prettier than her models. Like so many of the women who conquer the heights of New York fashion world, Melanie’s fiercely chic image belies provincial roots: She came to Gotham from Alabama seven years ago.

But neither her New York friends nor Andrew (Patrick Dempsey), her smooth, wealthy JFK Jr.-esque boyfriend, have any idea that Melanie’s self-reinvention includes covering up a rough and tumble “redneck” past and that her stories of growing up on a wealthy plantation are all fabricated.

When Andrew – who’s not only rich, but the son of New York’s cynical, snobbish mayor (Candice Bergen) – proposes to her in expensively spectacular fashion, Melanie is thrilled. But she also has urgent, secret business to take care of in the hometown she hasn’t visited in seven years.

Melanie, it turns out, has been married before, to her handsome but feckless high school sweetheart, Jake (Matthew McConnaughey clone Josh Lucas), and their divorce was never made final.

But when she turns up in Pigeon Creek, papers in hand, Jake refuses to sign and the two are soon screaming abuse at each other. Realizing that it might take some time to get Jake to do the right thing, Melanie settles in and revisits her youthful haunts.

This includes a surprising, uncomfortable scene at the local honky-tonk during which Melanie – whose old accent and underlying meanness seem to be brought out by alcohol – outs one of her childhood friends (Ethan Embry). Soon, some of her old feelings for Jake return. It also seems that he’s never stopped loving her. It’s all too clear that at some point, she’s going to have to choose between the two men who love her.

“Sweet Home Alabama” is one of those movies that belong to what Joe Queenan has called the “Poor Is Good” genre. The inhabitants of Pigeon Creek are warmer, more honest and more fun than the people in Melanie’s Gotham set.

But there is something halfhearted and poorly informed about the way screenwriter C. Jay Cox employs the standard stereotypes: The superficial New Yorkers aren’t as superficial, mean or confused about what makes the good life as they should be. And the eccentric but warm-hearted Southerners aren’t nearly colorful enough. (Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place co-star as Melanie’s working-class parents.)

There are also problems of verisimilitude. It’s bad enough that the filmmakers seem to have no sense of Southern manners; it’s worse that their Alabama also seems to have undergone an extensive ethnic cleansing of black people.