Because I Said So
Because I Said So
is like a movie that has been dropped down to earth from some weird time
warp from the 1960s. Literally, it seems completely and totally removed
from today’s world – like an odd visitor from the Donna Reed Show
days which has learned a little
about sex.
It is a film that officially gives the term “chick flick” a bad name. Don’t
get me wrong. Even as a man I recognize and appreciate that chick
flicks can be extremely well made and effective. This is not one of those
cases, though. Because I Said So is so divorced from common sense
and logic that you wonder; what did four such talented actresses see in
these stupid roles?
It is the story of the Wilder women. They are one of those annoying
families you only see in romantic comedies that who go everywhere together,
talk on the phone when they're not with each other and periodically break out into group renditions of golden
oldies.
The mother is Daphne (Diane Keaton), a smart woman, a good cook and a
divorced mother of three beautiful professional daughters. Maggie, the
oldest daughter (Lauren Graham of Gilmore Girls) is a psychiatrist
who is married with kids and settled into a comfortable if not necessarily
exciting wedded existence. Mae (Piper Perabo of Coyote Ugly) is the
middle daughter, who is happily married and doesn’t seem to work, just talks
about sex or has it on a nearly constant basis. (Well as close to a
constant basis as we can see, because the script seems to forget she is
there through most of the running time. But when she is there, she’s all
about sex.)
However, Daphne’s main worries all hover (the script’s word, not mine)
around youngest daughter Milly (Mandy Moore) – who is beautiful, vivacious,
owner of a successful catering business, sexually active and fun, but has a
tendency to date the wrong guys. So despite the fact that Milly can’t be
out of her mid-twenties, her mother has made it her purpose in life to get
her married off – as soon as possible.
The truth is, Daphne is pathological. I mean it – completely and
irretrievably insane. She is an over-bearing control-freak, a meddler on an
almost super-human level. Despite the fact that she insists more than once
she hates to meddle in her girls’ lives it is all she does. And yet,
no matter how angry they become at her, and no matter how much they bitch
about her, all the girls go straight to their mother anytime they have any
news or problems.
Daphne decides to take out an internet personal ad for Milly – without
actually telling her daughter about it – and meets the guys herself to
decide who would be best. This leads to a stupid and borderline offensive
scene where she meets a whole series of unfit potential lovers for her
daughter – including the fat, the balding, the nerds, the poorly dressed,
the awkward, a lesbian, the low-blood-sugared, the talkative, the quiet, the
foreign – pretty much every bad date stereotype is touched on. At the very
end of this trying scene, two “normal” guys show up, a handsome rich
architect (Tom Everett Scott of That Thing You Do!) and an equally
handsome poor guitarist (Gabriel Macht).
Though Daphne only approves of the architect, both guys go on the down low
to meet Milly. Both start dating her. You can tell right away which guy is
right for Milly and which guy is wrong, though of course Daphne gets it
ass-backwards. She has to come around through her own return to love – one
of the guys' fathers (Stephen Collins of Seventh Heaven) reminds
Daphne what passion really is about. Yawn…
The movie is so tone
deaf that it thinks it is adorably precocious to have a little boy say to a
woman he’s just met, “You have a ‘gina… I have a penis and you have a
‘gina… Can I see it?” In fact, scarily, the ‘gina reference comes up
later, becoming a slight running gag. Other cringe-worthy scenes include a
daughter trying to explain to her mother what an orgasm feels like, that
same mother trying to shield her dog from having to see internet porn and
the all of the Wilder women in their skivvies in a gym locker room
discussing the relative values of thongs vs. granny panties. They refer to
sex as “doing the oompah loompah.” Also, sadly, we have to be ear-witnesses
to mom learning what an orgasm feels like after all. Yuckkk…
Yet, perhaps chief amongst Because I Said So’s
many crimes against cinema is that you don’t make a movie with Diane
Keaton in it and then have one of the characters swipe a line from Annie
Hall – only arguably her best work and certainly the film in which
Keaton became a superstar, won an Oscar and was radiant and brilliant.
Because I Said So wasn’t doing well by itself without bringing to mind
that vastly superior film. Not that Keaton is
completely blameless in this – this is easily her
worst performance in about forty years of acting –
and she has released some real stinkers in the past, too.
For the record, the purloined line has Keaton
suggest the guitarist who was interested in
her daughter would only break her heart because he was a musician and
probably looking for a fling. The guy says, “I love being reduced to a
cultural cliché…” In all fairness to
Because I Said So, the line in Annie Hall was about loving being
reduced to a cultural stereotype, so the writers
must have worked hard to use the thesaurus feature on
their word processor to get the one different word.
I
wish that the screenwriters had tried using the
delete function instead. Not just for that one line, but for the entire
script.
Jay
S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2007 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved.
Posted: May 16, 2007.
