Starring: Hugh Grant, Marissa Tomei, Bella Heathcote
After a string of critical and commercial failures, award-winning screenwriter Keith Michaels (Grant) is struggling to pay the bills. Desperate, he reluctantly takes on work as a screenwriting teacher at a modest university in upstate New York, working only for the pay-check and ensuring that his class is mostly filled with attractive, young female students. However, a mature student named Holly (Tomei) also works her way into the class and Keith begins to develop bonds with his students, especially Holly.
To date, director Marc Lawrence has achieved a lot of his fame for his romantic comedies starring Hugh Grant (or Sandra Bullock in the case of his screenplay for Miss Congeniality and in the case of Two Weeks Notice, both Bullock and Grant). In this capacity, Lawrence has combed out a certain persona for Hugh Grant. Whilst Richard Curtis has painted Grant's characters as slightly foppish and inarticulate but charming and romantic buffoons, Lawrence's Grant is a snarker and less kindly, but still ultimately loveable.
This partnership with Hugh Grant has stood Marc Lawrence in good stead as far as The Rewrite is concerned. Fans of fluffy, inoffensive and ineffectual romantic comedies will probably find this pretty enjoyable as it does everything these films are expected to do, even if it doesn't really break conventions. As a film based around screenwriting, upon critiquing it, its's natural to look at the quality of the material presented and its comedic value is pleasant and lukewarm. There are a few funny moments here and there, but nothing particularly gut-busting. It's here where High Grant is really the secret weapon as his deliveries of these lines and his comfort with the character (which was almost certainly written with him in mind) bring the quality of the jokes up a notch.
Marissa Tomei is enjoyably sparky and it's always nice to see Chris Elliott, even if this isn't his greatest role as Grant's friendly Shakespeare-spouting colleague. The teens are more troublesome, not because of their performances but because of their depictions. TheRewrite paints its characters with broad strokes with only a few personality traits per character and most of the older characters manage to get away with it (although Allison Janney's turn as an uptight professor disapproving of Grant doesn't do Janney's more energetic talents justice and makes her rather unlikable). The students are just a mixture of stereotypes that are only slightly fleshed-out. There's the hyperactive squealing girl, the Star Wars-obsessed nerd and a nihilistic girl with a Daria-esque monotone. It isn't the worst case of stock characters in movies, but there's no brilliant Breakfast Club style deconstruction either beyond basic attempts.
What little is actually given away of the award-winning script that our lead has supposedly written, Paradise Misplaced, the fictional film sounds pretty terrible and it's odd to hear it being so lauded by so many characters. I have the sense that the original film was a lot sillier and less mature than the final result. If that's the case, then I congratulate Marc Lawrence. This is definitely not scraping the bottom of the comedy barrel. It just isn't at the top, either. It's resting in the middle, undisturbed but maybe not particularly loved, to stretch a metaphor very thin. It's fine, but no masterclass.
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