Alex & Emma

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Devoid of allure, absent spark, and lacking in narrative enticements, Alex & Emma, this year's would-be romantic comedy from Rob Reiner, is instead a ridiculously unfunny tedium that will surely be anathema to even the most accepting lovers of romance everywhere.  It is dreadfully conceived, poorly written, and painfully edited.

The problem is not with the leads -- at least not individually. Luke Wilson, who plays Alex, and Kate Hudson, who plays Emma, may each have their limitations for high drama, but both are in themselves easily likable and amiably engaging. Not together, though. Not in the same frame, and surely not in the same embrace, where they tend to remind one of the unappetizingly unachieved sizzle of raw onions in a pan when the flame has gone out, suffocating whatever punch or pique they may have had under slick slow-melting butter slabs of sticky ickiness.

Not very romantically inspiring, but even still potentially forgivable in a storyline that charms. This one, despite naming Dostoevsky as its source material, does not.

Alex is supposed to be a gambler and a writer. Although the film provides no persuasive evidence of either, we do, regretfully, spend a lot of the movie listening to him write bad prose and watching his alter ego -- bromidically reified from that prose in godawful intersplices of fictional fiction into the fictional fact -- put chips on a roulette board, spin the wheel, and lose now and again.  When the movie opens, Alex has got a deadly block -- if he can't write a novel in thirty days, his publisher won't give him $125,000 and the "Cuban mafia," to whom he has committed 4/5 of that, will kill him.  (We know they mean it, as we've seen them set fire to his laptop and hang him out a window, both acts we'll find justifiable by film's end).

Emma is a have-machine-will-travel stenographer whom he lures to his apartment on the pretense that it's a law firm named for some of the less-remembered presidents (it's a sign of Reiner's, or writer Jeremy Leven's disconnection from his audience that the film thinks the reference to presidents like Polk and Taylor will strike us as funny. No one in my audience even seemed to notice a joke had been made). Alex hires Emma to take his dictation as the days to his ultimata count down -- and apparently, she can take it better than we can (ba-dum-bump), as the requisite falling-in-love montage -- the film's only silent, and therefore most enjoyable, moment -- seems to illustrate.

Lo and behold, art imitates life imitates art, Alex's 20s-era novel is intercut with Alex's 2000-era life, and Alex's hero Adam, also Wilson, in love with rich, greedy, Polina (Sophie Marceau, who can't even act in her own language) playing a sort of Daisy to his Nick, finds himself sidelined by the hired help -- a series of housemaids all (over)played by Hudson.

Of course it all goes the way romantic comedies do -- but we just do not care. 

In fact, such is the boredom into which the film drags us that I found myself wanting to shout that they hadn't accounted for taxes, so the money won't be enough, he'll be dead whether he writes or not, so there's no point anyway and can't they just turn off the projector and please, please, please, let us all go home.

Roger Ebert's scathing review was too generous. Alex & Emma is not a better movie than The Sum Of Us.

I did not like it.  I did not like it at all.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
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