Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

‘Laggies’ ladies get few laughies

PARK CITY — I was packing up my things and getting ready to beat a retreat from director Lynn Shelton’s “Laggies” at about the halfway mark. I’d had just about all the lazy sitcom contrivances, dopey gags and would-be clever banter I could take, not to mention the plucky heroine (Keira Knightley), for whom There’s Just Something Missing about her boyfriend, and the gratingly rom-commy interstitial music. Then the clouds parted and the sun began to shine. Sam Rockwell had appeared on screen. Suddenly lead ingots were holding me to my seat.

But let me back up a bit. Knightley plays Megan, one of a quartet of high school girlfriends who can’t quite let go of high school, and as her friends begin to marry off she is getting closer to wedding her sweet, artsy but somewhat spineless boyfriend, a photographer. When she sees her dad making out with a woman not his wife at a pal’s wedding reception, something snaps in her and she leaves the reception and drives to a grocery store, where she winds up buying some booze for some nice kids she meets outside the store. Their ringleader (Chloe Grace Moretz, who really seems to be forcing the charm here) becomes Megan’s new BFF, and soon we’re looking at certifiably Hollywood-wacky scenes of Megan pretending to be the mom of Annika (Moretz) at a parent-teacher conference. Then, in order to buy some time away from her fiance, whom she has told she is going to a conference involving her sort-of profession as a marriage counselor, Megan simply moves in with Annika for a week, hoping to sneak in without attracting the notice of Annika’s too-observant lawyer dad, Craig.

Craig is played by Sam Rockwell, who instantly makes the film better. This is not the first time I’ve said that Rockwell has most of the funny lines in virtually every movie he’s in (in this case, about 80 percent of them), and he always seems to sound like Sam Rockwell — fast, loose, laidback and so sharp. Can he really be writing big chunks of his own dialogue in every movie? Or is it that he’s just such a master of comedy that he can make anything funny? He even made me laugh at the line “Who are you?” In any case, no movie is a write-off if Sam is in it.

As Craig and Megan begin to flirt, you can see the whole rest of the movie stretching out in front of you, and Knightley gets fairly annoying in her effort to be Meg Ryan, but I stayed anyway, because Rockwell is just that good. Overall, the movie is typical of what happens when Sundancers try to slum it and make broad, middle-of-the-road entertainment; they think it’s easy to appeal to millions of viewers, but it isn’t. Also, audiences have completely lost interest in romcoms and can’t be persuaded to go out and pay for exactly the kind of thing the networks are showing at 9 pm. So despite its being as cute, formulaic and inoffensive as it can be, the movie doesn’t hold much commercial promise. But I’d gladly watch Rockwell’s scenes again.