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MUST LOVE DOGS Send This Review to a Friend
Diane Lane is so appealing that enjoying her performance makes up for a lot in this tale of romance that is geared toward comedy but also attempts to be a serious love story. Up to the minute with internet dating, the screenplay by director Gary David Goldberg, based on Claire Cook’s novel, thrives on its amusing gambits but gets progressively more unlikely as the complications mount.
The basic premise involves the intelligent, attractive Sarah (Lane), divorced and depressed. Her family is bugging her to start dating, and her sister Carol, played by Elizabeth Perkins in sort of a wisecracking Eve Arden mode, composes an internet ad, and the contacts begin to surface. There’s much ado about the odd types Sarah meets, including the shock she gets when she answers an ad and the guy turns out to be her widower father (Christopher Plummer), who is waiting at the rendezvous point with a yellow rose. This renders her even more hopeless.
Prospects begin to look up when Sarah is impressed by the attractive Bob (Dermot Mulroney), the father of a boy in the pre-school where she teaches. He and his wife are trying separation. There is also the internet contact, newly divorced and disillusioned Jake, nicely played by John Cusack, but they both feel awkward under the circumstances of their meeting. It’s a matter of how long it will take for them to find a way.
Despite the title, dogs figure only incidentally, pleasantly used as prop companions. The film is affable enough for a while, with wry humor thanks to Lane’s ability with exasperated looks, offbeat remarks and her general warmth. The trouble is that after a while the adult behavior borders on the absurd. One such scene involves Sarah and Jake about to have sex for the first time but lacking a condom and racing around town in a car to find a drug store open so by the time Jake can buy a packet, the horniness is dissipated.
There are also the missed opportunities for them to seriously connect, when mature individuals interested in one another could simply pick up a phone and get together, but then all the supposedly cute and tortured stuff of the screenplay would be unnecessary. The way in which love finally triumphs is totally ridiculous.
Stockard Channing does a nice job playing the divorce-weary Dolly, one of the women Sarah’s father is romancing and Plummer gives a smooth performance as a man who doesn’t think any woman can replace his late wife and is merely having fun dating an assortment who find him appealing, but still is gravitating toward Dolly.
The film is observant about the difficulties single women have in meeting Mr. Right, the possibilities and perils of internet dating and the ability of older men to line up willing younger women for their escapades. But “Must Love Dogs” is too much in the typical Hollywood vein to work on anything near the level of sophistication that might make it more than a summer entry that’s passable in comparison with what else Hollywood has unleashed. Still, there is Diane Lane. A Warner Brothers Pictures release.
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