Just passing through

New in Town is the dead-end of a rather spirited line of films. Though obviously a riff on the marvelous film version of Pajama Game, one of the better Broadway musicals from the '50s, it also hearkens back to that wonderfully late-term screwball comedy The Devil and Miss Jones (not to be confused with Gerard Damiano's very different The Devil in Miss Jones).

In the 1941 film directed by Sam Wood, from a fine script by Norman Krasna, a department store tycoon (Charles Coburn at his most deviously avuncular) infiltrates his own store as an employee to get to the bottom of his workers' attempt to unionize. He's the "devil" who will begin to see things from the little guy's point of view after he befriends store clerk Miss Jones (an ebullient Jean Arthur).

But the main reference point for New in Town is George Abbott and Stanley Donen's Pajama Game, where the Sleeptite Pajama Company's new anti-union supervisor (John Raitt repeating the role he originated on Broadway) goes up against one of the local factory's union representatives (Doris Day). Needless to say, opposites attract.

The genders are reversed in New in Town. Renee Zellweger plays Lucy Hill, a hard-as-nails corporate angel of death from Miami, who descends on one of her firm's food-processing plants in New Ulm, Minnesota, to shake things up or close the place down. Within hours of landing in the frigid outback of the state, she will meet her opposite, union rep Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick, Jr.). The initial meeting is a disaster, though the final result will not come as a surprise.

Typically, the tycoon or big-city executive is won over by the noble ordinariness of common men and women, and the same will happen in New Ulm to Lucy Hill. It's a marvelous myth, but can only work if these real people are actually real people.

New in Town, however, offers a Toonville of Minnesotans: types, rather than personalities, who all struggle to sound like Frances McDormand's Marge Gunderson in the Coen brothers' Fargo. Interestingly, the most annoying of these impersonations is from the usually fine actor Siobhan Fallon, who plays a character also surnamed Gunderson (Fallon seems even to have studied the facial expressions McDormand gave to Marge).

Unable to identify or root for these Land O' Lakes meat puppets (who could have all been fed into a wood chipper, as far as I was concerned), it is difficult to feel invested in this version of the homespun, class redemption myth.

Danish director Jonas Elmer is no Frank Capra, the king of class commentary comedies. He was undoubtedly hired with the assumption that he would bring some great understanding to the third and fourth generations of Scandinavians that inhabit the snowbound plains of Minnesota. Obviously, the producers were wrong.

It didn't need to be this bad, and it was impossible to watch this film and not wonder what Capra, with Arthur or Barbara Stanwyck, could have done with it. Certainly, Arthur and Stanwyck's Lucy Hill would have had more comic and romantic flair than Zellweger can now achieve. But, to be ungracious, it would also have been easier to watch them on the big screen. Zellweger has had some "work done," shall we say, which has left her face a bizarre patchwork map of possible ages. From the nose upward, the flesh seems Botox-benumbed, eliminating any wrinkles but also hampering any significant eye and forehead expressions, which is a bit of a handicap for an actor.

Below the nose things seem rather normal, though Zellwegger's mouth, the last organ possessing some natural life of its own (aside from the collagen-inflated lips, but these are a sideshow - a Dali Mae West sofa), is called upon to provide most of the reactive, nonverbal work. Zellweger pouts (well, with those lips?), frowns or bares her teeth in an approximation of a smile for two hours. Occasionally though, her mouth hangs agape in reactive moments, creating the impression that you're studying a middle-aged woman whose face has suffered a partial stroke. Comedy, romantic or otherwise, is difficult to communicate under these conditions.

Connick is better at the he-man act. Plus, as another transplant, he's spared becoming one of the land's 10,000 fakes, unlike otherwise talented actors such as Frances Conroy and (in two losses out of two this week) J.K. Simmons. Everyone golly-gees and okey-dokeys like voice talents who don't realize they're being filmed.

As in the '30s and '40s, the age is ripe for films dealing with the unsteady work world. An urban sophisticate coming to a Grover's Corners or Bedford Falls to shut one of the last plants, and learning that job cuts are more than just a ledger figure, is wholly relevant. It's an old trope that would still play as new, though not in New in Town, which is just passing through toward a well deserved obscurity, anyway.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at
ssilvis@praguepost.com